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You know, a lot of non-academic languages are pretty crappy... like Ruby, or PHP. But I'm not impressed with languages out of academia either. I don't care ab
by bhiggins 16y ago
You know, a lot of non-academic languages are pretty crappy... like Ruby, or PHP. But I'm not impressed with languages out of academia either. I don't care about your -morphisms or fancy type systems...
- alextgordon 16y agoI disagree. It's true that a lot of programming language research is impractical in the real world, but occasionally it produces gems. I'd rather have the gems than nothing at all. The real danger is not the languages, but their proponents. Academia can't make you use Haskell, but other people can.
- strlen 16y agoYou know, creationism and demon possession are both quite crappy. But I'm not impressed with biology out of academia either. I don't care about your evolution or fancy germ theory...
- bhiggins 16y agoYour argument is so compelling. Now I see how wrong I've been. I'll just accept everything the ivory tower says from now on, on any topic, unconditionally. Brilliant.
- Luyt 16y agoReminds me of something I read on http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4217 http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4217 : Appeal to Lack of Authority Authority has a reputation for being corrupt and inflexible, and this stereotype has been leveraged by some who assert that their own lack of authority somehow makes them a better authority. Starling might say of the 9/11 attacks: "Every reputable structural engineer understands how fire caused the Twin Towers to collapse." Bombo can reply: "I'm not an expert in engineering or anything, I'm just a regular guy asking questions." Starling: "We should listen to what the people who know what they're talking about have to say." Bombo: "Someone needs to stand up to these experts." The idea that not knowing what you're talking about somehow makes you heroic or more reliable is incorrect. More likely, your lack of expertise simply makes you wrong.
- strlen 16y ago> The idea that not knowing what you're talking about somehow makes you heroic or more reliable is incorrect That's a really good definition of anti-intellectualism. It's easy to sneer at academic languages (and easy to hate them, just observe a college frosh/soph struggling through Scheme or Haskell), but things we now take for granted e.g., garbage collection, virtual machines, IDEs, object orientation, templates/generics were all (even recently) considered academic.
- bhiggins 16y agothe only struggle with scheme is with falling asleep
- bhiggins 16y agomaybe next year, if you keep up the good work, you'll be reading about Appeal to Some Website.
- chc 16y agoIf you've taken the time to learn Lisp and it hasn't impressed you even a little bit, you're made of more stubborn stuff than most programmers. But most of the "non-academic" languages wind up cribbing from the academic languages anyway. For example, Python is very much a Working Man's language, but it pervasively uses not only garbage collection (from Lisp), but also list comprehensions borrowed directly from Haskell!
- bhiggins 16y agoI'm impressed with lambda calculus as a mathematical formalisms and its equivalence with TMs, and I am impressed but not overly enamored with homoiconicity & metaprogramming/macros. I like conditionals. Not a fan of marketing minimal syntax but having special forms. Not a fan of cons as a a building block for everything. Not a big believer in garbage collection. And certainly not a believer that Lisp is a practical programming language for much of anything these days. But don't let me stop you from caaaaadring away!
- orborde 16y ago> Not a big believer in garbage collection. This makes me seriously wonder whether you're trolling. Out of purest and most innocent curiosity, what sort of programming do you do?