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This is a particularly valueless comparative assessment of some programming languages, with a focus on Clojure. I'm surprised that it was posted here, and more

by al3x 17y ago

This is a particularly valueless comparative assessment of some programming languages, with a focus on Clojure. I'm surprised that it was posted here, and more surprised that it's getting up-voted. But then, people don't really want hard comparisons of the tools they use. Instead, they want warm fuzzy emotional validation that reinforces the time commitments they make to learning those tools. This comment doesn't cite any firsthand experience, doesn't cite even any secondhand experience, and makes frequent generalizations and assumptions about where, how, and why respective languages are designed and used. It also makes the all-too-frequently-made, blithe, and baseless assumption that languages are necessarily in competition, or that if they are in competition, that competition is zero-sum. This is a bar conversation in comment form. It's hand-waving. Look: comparing programming languages is hard. You can't do it in a blog comment. You can't really even do it in a blog post. Researchers have a hard time doing it in lengthy academic papers. Hardly anyone has attempted to do it in book form. Don't think that someone summarizing the bullet points from the feature lists of two languages and then extrapolating them out over their particular view of the industry is anything other than opinion. If that opinion validates your choice of language, great; you'll sleep better tonight. But this is just talk. Experience and metrics are what counts.

programnature 17y ago
I don't think the authors intention is to compare the relative merits of the languages in the context of a particular project. Its more about horserace and market niche. And these are terms in which startup founders are accustomed to thinking in - in the absence of data, you look at related trends and use your reasoned intuition to think about the spread of new ways of doing things. My guess is that a lot of people read that comment and figured that it made sense and captured conventional wisdom in a succinct way. As an aside, because language adoption has network effects, the fact that a lot of people can get interested and excited about Clojure is itself meaningful, which is why I upvoted it.

by al3x 17y ago

programnature 17y ago

I don't think the authors intention is to compare the relative merits of the languages in the context of a particular project. Its more about horserace and market niche. And these are terms in which startup founders are accustomed to thinking in - in the absence of data, you look at related trends and use your reasoned intuition to think about the spread of new ways of doing things. My guess is that a lot of people read that comment and figured that it made sense and captured conventional wisdom in a succinct way. As an aside, because language adoption has network effects, the fact that a lot of people can get interested and excited about Clojure is itself meaningful, which is why I upvoted it.