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As an outsider looking in: programmers, fix thy tools. My first introduction to programming was QBasic in the 90s, and I had a great time making little picture
by bloaf 10y ago
As an outsider looking in: programmers, fix thy tools.
My first introduction to programming was QBasic in the 90s, and I had a great time making little pictures, beeps/bloops, and text on the screen. I then moved on to some basic Fortran and other engineering-type languages in undergrad c. 2006. My impression of the workflows for Fortran at that time was "this is more annoying than BASIC, but I guess its because its more powerful and complex. I bet they'll fix the awkwardness eventually though."
Imagine my supersize when I decide to pick up the trendy modern language of Haskell in 2015 and find out that installing, configuring, and working in it was just as bad as Fortran back in 2006. WTF has everybody been doing for the past 10-20 years?
It seems to me that because programming is a new discipline, lots of people are trying to reinvent wheels. There is nothing wrong with this, in and of itself, since we'll essentially be making sure that we get really good at making wheels and end up with really high quality specimens. The problem is that wheels by themselves aren't that useful, and no one is bothering to make an automobile.
QBasic might have had square wheels, but at least they felt attached to something.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> It seems to me that because programming is a new discipline, lots of people are trying to reinvent wheels. There is nothing wrong with this, in and of itself, since we'll essentially be making sure that we get really good at making wheels and end up with really high quality specimens. The problem is that wheels by themselves aren't that useful, and no one is bothering to make an automobile. There's a lot of truth to that. People are blazing forward, without even looking at the past that's beyond the most recent trendy languages and frameworks. End result is that there's a lot of wheels reinvented, but poorly. Learning Lisp was a particular eye opener for me. It was a gateway drug to discovering that there were so many things, so better thought out than what we have now (maybe because people did actually think about what they're doing back then, instead of releasing glorified CRUD apps "early and often"), and we're only sometimes slowly reinventing them.
- bloaf 10y agoI love this article: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/ruins-of-forgotten-empires-apl-languages/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/ruins-of-forgo...
- unexistance 10y agohoorah for mathematical basis
- Annatar 10y ago> WTF has everybody been doing for the past 10-20 years? They have mostly been touching and stroking themselves by inventing a new programming language every 15 minutes, rather than sitting their asses down for ten years, mastering one language properly, and then squeezing the living daylights out of it in performance, simplicity and efficiency... nope, that requires actual work, it's much cooler to invent yet another way of doing the exact same thing: wheee! Look at me, I invented yet another language!!! THAT is what they've been doing.