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Leo Tolstoy on War and Peace: "I decided to write a detailed story about events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era

Leo Tolstoy on War and Peace: "I decided to write a detailed story about events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families; since I haven't used the language before, for kicks I decided to do it in Swahili. This blog post will summarize why I hate Swahili and why it's totally unsuitable for writing about Tsarist Russian society - or, I would say, anything else. Swahili is awful and needs to die." Seriously, how can people write blog posts like this? You decided to code up a new project in a totally new language, and are here to tell us why that new language is awful. Really? Really? It's not like this is uncommon. People make these blog posts all the time! What's with this? ------------------- EDIT: I got downvoted, but look: >A few weeks ago, on a whim my friend and I decided to hackathon our way through an app to help us learn how to play guitar. In a stroke of inspiration, we decided to learn something new, and do the project in the Elm programming language, about which I had heard many good things. >Consider this post to be what I wished I knew about Elm before deciding to write code in it. Since I can’t send this information into the past and save myself a few weeks of frustration, it’s too late for me, but perhaps you, gentle reader, can avoid this egregious tarpit of a language where abstraction goes to die." It doesn't take "a few weeks" to learn a programming language!!!

dwenzek 10y ago
I agree. The post's tone is a bit harsh and could be more respectful. After all, there is no consensus for type classes, [ML's modules being an alternative](https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/modules-matter-most/ https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/modules-mat...) Nonetheless, the post is interesting and worth the reading because it raises true questions. For instance, I was surprised to learn that adding a field to an extensible record was no more a feature.
mikekchar 10y ago
> It doesn't take "a few weeks" to learn a programming language!!! No, it doesn't. It takes a few hours. Which, I'm sure sounds flippant, but hear me out. In the 25-30 years I've been a professional programmer, I've been paid to use many different languages. FORTH, Fortran, C, C++, Pascal, Protel, C#, Java, Perl, Ruby, Go, Javascript/Coffeescript, and Python are the ones that come off the top of my head, but if I were to go through my CV, I'd definitely remember a few more. Anyone who has programmed in a handful of the above will notice that (with the exception of FORTH) these languages are practically identical. They all have slightly different features and slightly different syntax, but once you know one, you can pick up another one pretty easily. Especially once you know 5 or 6 of them, you practically don't even need to look at the docs. Just glance at some example code and you are on your way. Libraries and frameworks take a lot more time than languages. There are lots of crazy details that you have to remember. Luckily, most of the major languages of the same type have very similar base libraries. As long as you stay away from frameworks, you can be productive pretty much immediately. Learning the details can take a few weeks, but mostly its unimportant. Frameworks suck. I've been working in Rails on and off for... 4 years???? I'll never put that damn thing on my CV. I still don't understand how it works. So, I don't know this author, but he is clearly knowledgeable in Haskell. Maybe he also knows Ocaml. It would take you about 15 seconds to pick up Elm from that background. The rest is discovering (and apparently complaining) about the bits that don't live up to your expectations. He didn't comment on the state of the libraries (except to complain about the political process for getting libraries distributed with the official tools). I'm not going to defend his rant. I didn't enjoy the tone and I think he completely misses the point of why the language is there. But his technical complaints are perfectly reasonable. I didn't vote you down, but I suspect the reason other people did is that you are a bit too quick to criticise the author's ability to accurately judge the language. He seems perfectly capable, even if I disagree with his conclusions and his tone.
- logicallee 10y ago
  So my point was actually about the specifics of picking up a language to do a new project, and then complaining about it. (Hence my example of writing a serious book in a language you don't know.) I think you really go into superlatives here. It's not fair for you to say "15 seconds", for example. 15 seconds is how long you've been reading this comment. (I just timed myself, okay maybe 10-13 seconds.) I also think that "a few hours" is an exaggeration on your part. Let's pick a language you've never used - take Objective-C which is similar to C# and C, C++ which you've already listed, and I think you've never programmed in it, because if you had you would probably have listed it. Okay, so now make a serious iOS app in Objective-C in "a few hours". As in, have one by this time tomorrow. See? It's crazy. That's not how it works. Maybe the weeks and months and decades run together for you, but there is a huge difference between doing something for a few months or a year, or doing something for a couple of weeks as our author reports. I don't like his kind of blog posts, and it is a whole category - there is this whole type of blog post where you pick something you've never used, use it to do something new, and then complain about it, all within the space of your first week or two using it. It strikes me as kind of ridiculous. Especially with a provocative title like "Elm is wrong." Literally, it's like Tolstoy writing War and Peace in Swahili, a language he didn't know, and then writing a blog post "Swahili is wrong" -- all within the space of two weeks of when he first learned Swahili. I might be exaggerating slightly, but I think my analogy holds. It's almost farcical.
  - mmarx 10y ago
    > Okay, so now make a serious iOS app in Objective-C in "a few hours". As in, have one by this time tomorrow. See? It's crazy. That's not how it works. But then making an iOS app requires picking up frameworks/libraries, not only learning Objective C, which was exactly GP's point: >> Libraries and frameworks take a lot more time than languages.
    - logicallee 10y ago
      From the article: "Unfortunately, Elm isn’t a library. It’s a language, which just happens to have a great library" I don't know why we're arguing about this. It's another blog poster writing about something new they tried for one particular project, and in this case literally "why it's wrong". (After two weeks.) It's hard to take seriously.

dwenzek 10y ago

I agree. The post's tone is a bit harsh and could be more respectful. After all, there is no consensus for type classes, [ML's modules being an alternative](https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/modules-matter-most/ https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/modules-mat...) Nonetheless, the post is interesting and worth the reading because it raises true questions. For instance, I was surprised to learn that adding a field to an extensible record was no more a feature.

mikekchar 10y ago

> It doesn't take "a few weeks" to learn a programming language!!! No, it doesn't. It takes a few hours. Which, I'm sure sounds flippant, but hear me out. In the 25-30 years I've been a professional programmer, I've been paid to use many different languages. FORTH, Fortran, C, C++, Pascal, Protel, C#, Java, Perl, Ruby, Go, Javascript/Coffeescript, and Python are the ones that come off the top of my head, but if I were to go through my CV, I'd definitely remember a few more. Anyone who has programmed in a handful of the above will notice that (with the exception of FORTH) these languages are practically identical. They all have slightly different features and slightly different syntax, but once you know one, you can pick up another one pretty easily. Especially once you know 5 or 6 of them, you practically don't even need to look at the docs. Just glance at some example code and you are on your way. Libraries and frameworks take a lot more time than languages. There are lots of crazy details that you have to remember. Luckily, most of the major languages of the same type have very similar base libraries. As long as you stay away from frameworks, you can be productive pretty much immediately. Learning the details can take a few weeks, but mostly its unimportant. Frameworks suck. I've been working in Rails on and off for... 4 years???? I'll never put that damn thing on my CV. I still don't understand how it works. So, I don't know this author, but he is clearly knowledgeable in Haskell. Maybe he also knows Ocaml. It would take you about 15 seconds to pick up Elm from that background. The rest is discovering (and apparently complaining) about the bits that don't live up to your expectations. He didn't comment on the state of the libraries (except to complain about the political process for getting libraries distributed with the official tools). I'm not going to defend his rant. I didn't enjoy the tone and I think he completely misses the point of why the language is there. But his technical complaints are perfectly reasonable. I didn't vote you down, but I suspect the reason other people did is that you are a bit too quick to criticise the author's ability to accurately judge the language. He seems perfectly capable, even if I disagree with his conclusions and his tone.

logicallee 10y ago
So my point was actually about the specifics of picking up a language to do a new project, and then complaining about it. (Hence my example of writing a serious book in a language you don't know.) I think you really go into superlatives here. It's not fair for you to say "15 seconds", for example. 15 seconds is how long you've been reading this comment. (I just timed myself, okay maybe 10-13 seconds.) I also think that "a few hours" is an exaggeration on your part. Let's pick a language you've never used - take Objective-C which is similar to C# and C, C++ which you've already listed, and I think you've never programmed in it, because if you had you would probably have listed it. Okay, so now make a serious iOS app in Objective-C in "a few hours". As in, have one by this time tomorrow. See? It's crazy. That's not how it works. Maybe the weeks and months and decades run together for you, but there is a huge difference between doing something for a few months or a year, or doing something for a couple of weeks as our author reports. I don't like his kind of blog posts, and it is a whole category - there is this whole type of blog post where you pick something you've never used, use it to do something new, and then complain about it, all within the space of your first week or two using it. It strikes me as kind of ridiculous. Especially with a provocative title like "Elm is wrong." Literally, it's like Tolstoy writing War and Peace in Swahili, a language he didn't know, and then writing a blog post "Swahili is wrong" -- all within the space of two weeks of when he first learned Swahili. I might be exaggerating slightly, but I think my analogy holds. It's almost farcical.
- mmarx 10y ago
  > Okay, so now make a serious iOS app in Objective-C in "a few hours". As in, have one by this time tomorrow. See? It's crazy. That's not how it works. But then making an iOS app requires picking up frameworks/libraries, not only learning Objective C, which was exactly GP's point: >> Libraries and frameworks take a lot more time than languages.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    From the article: "Unfortunately, Elm isn’t a library. It’s a language, which just happens to have a great library" I don't know why we're arguing about this. It's another blog poster writing about something new they tried for one particular project, and in this case literally "why it's wrong". (After two weeks.) It's hard to take seriously.