Breaking my promise to respond to this, since TJG raises questions about me:
On Oct 27, 2011, at 5:03 AM, Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> No prob; I just kinda feel a responsibility to respond a little, given
> that we're not all in the tech industry; and after all, the guy did
> just die. (Not that thrilling to read someone "glad" about his life's
> work allegedly being a failure, and about some usenet flamer who
> supposedly ran "circles around" him. I didn't comment disrespectfully
> when Dennis Ritchie died.)
>
I confess I have never seen the value of respecting the dead. When Kissinger dies, time permitting, I will be dancing on his grave. Of course McCarthy was no Kissinger. As I acknowledged. The man was a computer science giant. Nevertheless, I think some (I wouldn’t say that’s all of his life’s work) of his output (the two I outlined: strong AI, FP via Lisp) have, in *my* opinion, political implications. If you feel the same way about Ritchie, you should most certainly speak about it. Like people did about Jobs, on this list, right after his death. Now I could be wrong, but calling it dick swinging or “ugly side of the programming beast” cannot establish that.
> "In my limited experience it’s always been the case that the
> language designers are the most tempered in the view concerning the
> universality of their creations. However, like any social group
> it’s others, often those not directly connected with the
> stewardship of said language who make the grandest and most
> universal claims. Alas this is an ugly side of the programming
> beast."
> — http://blog.fogus.me/2011/10/02/the-elite-programming-language-fallacy/
>
> The way your post framed the topic, even referring to yourself as "us
> proles of programming", was obviously in this vein.
Definitely not, obviously! As I wrote in my original post, I respect the man, but I consider it a good thing that Lisp is not one of the most used programming languages today. The above is just idle speculation about the character and motivations of others. In this case, the emphasis on a parenthetical throw away weak joke (“proles of programming”) allows transition to talk of “elite programming language”. That’s not my point. Programming languages are languages to write computer programs in. My complaint was concrete: there are people who write lines of bash code (as another commenter wrote) who don’t think they are doing programming. The space is awash in scientisms, application of terminology and concepts which do not better solve a problem, but do create barriers.
The real difference is not over that passage from the Clojure guy, but this one:
> Programming is hard. However, there are relative levels of difficulty. A text-editor is harder than the Towers of Hanoi and likewise an operating system is harder than a text-editor. Having said that, there are languages that are designed to solve hard problems. Clojure is one such language. Regardless, there is nothing stopping one from using Clojure to write Towers of Hanoi or text-editors. The “solving hard problems” bit simply means that the language itself provides first-class abstractions and features that encapsulate techniques and semantics to alleviate difficult problems.
That’s the one I disagree with. In particular, the implication of the sentence “there are languages that are designed to solve hard problems. Clojure is one such language.”. The differences arise on the importance of “first-class abstractions, …” in alleviating difficult problems - or rather, when and how these features are introduced and used, and how (and if) a novice reaches the status of “elite programmer” (that Fogus believes in) or salaried programmer. There are few serious languages designed merely to solve Towers of Hanoi.
> Barring
> disability or other misfortune, your post leads me to believe that you
> can choose to be a senior software developer ...
And what makes you so sure that I am not a senior software developer?
—ravi