16 ms·

It is, I think, going to be very difficult to enjoy writing code in a less powerful language when you are exposed to languages that hold awesome power. In fact

• bobsam 10y ago
  TL;DR : get off​ your high horses and get to work
  • jwdunne 10y ago
    Or perhaps "we are programmers - if you wish for X in a language, make it so". Maybe a bit too long? I certainly don't want to sound prickly :)
  • agumonkey 10y ago
    I ended up calling this engineering. Language is just a mean to an end, and learning its limits, picking one that match the most the problem at hand. That said FP/Lisp are very hard to leave, I can understand that.
  • iagooar 10y ago
    Isn't it possible to choose the best tool AND get to work? Isn't it our responsibility, as software engineers, to ensure that those who pay for our services get the best bang for their buck? That includes choosing a programming language that actually helps developing new features faster, while guaranteeing that the system is available, robust and maintenance costs are low. Choosing a language that makes these things difficult, is a poor choice. We should not accept subpar languages to be used just because.
    • jwdunne 10y ago
      You're right. If you have the freedom to choose the best tool, I think you absolutely should. I think the problem lies in the fact many programmers don't have the luxury of making those decisions. I imagine if one of those programmers refused to use the mandated tools, they'd get the sack. Many of those programmers, again, don't have the leg room to handle that. Plus, I don't think any employer would look favourably on "I got sacked because I refused to use language X because language Y is superior". I know that isn't the kind of attitude to work I would appreciate. The companies that allow freedom of choice in tools and languages are perhaps the best companies to work for. Unfortunately, those companies hire the best programmers in the first place, or at least set the bar with that in mind. Most programmers, including myself, are not of this calibre.
      • bobsam 10y ago
        Counterpoint: Programmers don't choose the best language, they choose the language they are comfortable using. Source: at a previous job we had a "use whatever tool you want, just get the job done" policy. After two years we had everything from Perl to JavaScript in the same project. Edit: ... and this project was a desktop application!
        • jwdunne 10y ago
          This is true, from my experience. When I'm screening candidates, I often ask them to solve a problem in their language of choice. They choose PHP, even though I know the same problem solution can be expressed far clearer and shorter in Ruby. Perhaps we are unearthing various kinds of choices i.e choices for best fit vs best convenience. Perhaps that's a case of engineering vs something other.
          • woah 10y ago
            Despite its checkered past, isn't php these days a more powerful language than ruby?
            • 10y ago
• camus2 10y ago
  > If you work in a job that forces the use of a less powerful language than what you've been exposed to, you can, I think, go through a sort of depression. You simply long to use the tools that you know hold much more power yet must resign yourself to the tools you have. I was forced to use go for a job, it actually made me feel stupider, so much that I didn't know how to use the right types anymore when i moved back to a more sophisticated language. I was afraid the language wouldn't let me do what I want, just like Go. There will be a "go programmer generation" and it's not going to be pretty. If people deem "generics too complicated to understand", what can you expect from programmers who don't want to learn anything? The only thing I find nice about the language is implicit interfaces. But not at all cost.
  • jwdunne 10y ago
    I am forced to use PHP at work. I hope that the stimulation I throw at my brain on lunch breaks and evenings offsets what you describe. Maybe it isn't enough and I'm on a long road down towards a point of no return. That said if I look back on the past 6 months, I believe I have improved. In fact, a core principle I hold dear goes as follows: "If I look back 6 months and I'm not any better, there's a big problem". At one point, it seemed to annoy my non-technical boss because he couldn't understand why some of the code I wrote 6 months ago is perhaps not as good as it could be. He has kept me around so maybe it isn't a bad thing :) We will, I think, always have programmers who don't want to learn anything new. It's interesting that there exists "Continuing Professional Development points" in the UK for healthcare: you get a rebate for each hour spent on courses to further your education. Maybe software engineering would benefit from this given the amount of, quite significant, cost sunk into large scale projects. Their universal credit programme should be incentive enough. Entirely different problem though. If not Go, then what?
  • andmarios 10y ago
    So, do people who write timeseries databases in Go (like influxdb and prometheus), people who solve complex infrastructure problems (like k8s and docker), people who do distributed software (like consul) feel stupider because they write in Go?
• manmal 10y ago
  It's stoicism for programming. Accept what you cannot change (tools, language), and focus on what you can change (attitude, striving for great solutions).
  • coldtea 10y ago
    >Accept what you cannot change Only you can easily change languages... Stoicism was referring to actual things one cannot change. Like, say, death, or their status as a roman slave. So it's less stoicism and more "our way or the highway".
    • burntsushi 10y ago
      > Only you can easily change languages... That's a ridiculous blanket statement to make. Changing languages can incur a very high cost. Making peace with this as an individual seems like a useful skill to acquire. If you want to insist then there's no connection to stoicism, then fine, but don't try to pass off language choice as something that's easy to change along the way.
      • coldtea 10y ago
        >That's a ridiculous blanket statement to make. Changing languages can incur a very high cost. Yes, but you can always not even get started with Go (or whatever language you don't like) to begin with, so no change cost there. Also, you can always change organizations, especially in today's "buyer's market" IT landscape. Better than working with something that you feel makes you miserable and non-productive. And it's best to apply the principle of charity to what one responds to. Things are not always meant at their strictest interpretation. Compared to the "things you cannot change" stoicism was concerned with (like death, your past, some genetic misfortune, etc.), a programming language is nothing especially unchangeable -- which was my point. That said, I absolutely love your libs and programs and use them all the time :-)
        • jwdunne 10y ago
          > That said, I absolutely love your libs and programs and use them all the time :-) I don't write Rust or Go code but his repo seems like it is a great showcase for both languages - from what I read, it seems Rust is a little bit more expressive than Go but, having not written anything significant in either, I'm not the best judge. I think Rust especially should be on on my "to explore" list :)
• rpeden 10y ago
  I agree to a certain extent. There are times when I've seen great beauty in something as mundane as pre-generics Java, when someone put together a well factored set of loosely couple objects to accomplish a task. Other times, though, being forced to work with obtuse tools feels like trying to construct a skyscraper out of sticks and dog crap. No matter how elegant a structure you manage to construct, doing so is a miserable experience because you're never able to transcend the feeling that you're working with twigs and poo.
  • jwdunne 10y ago
    I understand the analogy but I think many ancient cultures did great things with twigs and poo. In fact, there are many wattle and daub structures still standing - there's one around the corner that's protected by law.
    • literallycancer 10y ago
      Yep: http://www.citymetric.com/skylines/yemen-theres-city-full-500-year-old-skyscrapers-made-mud-1462 http://www.citymetric.com/skylines/yemen-theres-city-full-50...
  • hamming 10y ago
    this is a shitty analogy
• ruleabidinguser 10y ago
  >It is, I think, going to be very difficult to enjoy writing code in a less powerful language when you are exposed to languages that hold awesome power. As someone whos written code in Haskell (even some medium sized programs) and moved on just fine, no. Frankly, Haskell can be an excercise in frustration.
  • jwdunne 10y ago
    It depends, I imagine, on how much you enjoy working with it. If it was so painful, I think moving to another language would be refreshing as opposed to depressing.
  • mathw 10y ago
    I'd concur. It's mostly around tooling for me (and Stack has helped here) but whenever I pick up Haskell for an out-of-work project now I end up putting it down again. I find Rust increasingly pleasing, although the lack of constraints on side effects is frustrating compared to Haskell's purity.
• noir_lord 10y ago
  I prefer less powerful languages (that have sufficient power to clearly express the domain). I've found that "powerful" languages allow me to do clever things(TM) and I hate clever things(TM) retroactively when I come back to them. This gets even worse when you have multiple people on the team doing clever things(TM).
  • tazjin 10y ago
    Agreed, but I'd take this into a different direction and argue that code generation - as it is often practiced in Go - is a Clever Thing (TM). A language like Haskell lets me write extremely complicated code, but it also lets me concisely express the constraints I want in the form of types without getting too verbose. Go lets me do neither.
  • avisser 10y ago
    This is 100% my recollection of my 2 months of Scala.
  • coldtea 10y ago
    >I've found that "powerful" languages allow me to do clever things(TM) and I hate clever things(TM) retroactively when I come back to them. They also allow you to do sensible things(TM) like use the one and single, battle tested, standard library's generic sort, btree, etc implementation, instead of having to roll (and then read) 1000s of your own over the span of a year... And it's a false dichotomy that you can't have the sensible things(TM) without the too-clever-for-their-own-good-things (TM) you allude too.
    • canes123456 10y ago
      No one is arguing to roll your own when there a generic sort in the standard library. The issue with clever things is that people try to make a all purpose solution for what could be a simple one off solution. The all purpose is only used for 2-3 uses and it never battle tested.
      • unscaled 10y ago
• TheCondor 10y ago
  I don't know how to ask this without it sounding offensive, and I don't intend it that way. But do these "hardcore" haskellers enjoy writing programs at all? Like are there any well known open source apps that people actually use written in Haskell? There are tons of hobbiests and it has a following but what are the examples of its greatness? I ask as an old SML guy, I like the math theory, I like the promise of better, more accurate and reliable software, I think you can do some beautiful things with algebraic types but I've been dumbfounded by the lack of great examples out there. Ada suffered/suffers the same fate, it has this "academic" pedigree for robustness but not many examples that you can get your hands on. so much expressiveness that doesn't seem to result in much expression.
  • unscaled 10y ago
    I think Pandoc can count as an example here - it may be a niche product, but it's well known in its niche, and it's arguably the most powerful document markup format converter out there. And it's all Haskell.
  • shmageggy 10y ago
    Off the top of my head, Pandoc, a tool for converting between different markup/down flavors, and xmonad, a tiling window manager for linux. Both are well known and popular.
    • theoh 10y ago
      Is there anything actually interesting about what they do, though? Converting markup is not a complex task.
      • davesque 10y ago
        Pandoc actually converts between a wide range of document formats.
      • steveklabnik 10y ago
        Parsing is something that's very pleasant in Haskell. Other languages can use parser combinators too, of course. It's good at it though.
• brightball 10y ago
  You're not wrong. When you have access to what feels like "the answer" to so many problems and you repeatedly see your company experience those problems...over and over again...it can be depressing when the solution falls on deaf ears.
• sfifs 10y ago
  I find that I end up picking the excellent language engineering that is in Go almost any day over languages with many features that simply don't work well together. Just the other day I was struggling with the hopeless nightmare of Java's lack of true first class functions (but still having some first class function like semantics) combined with embedded classes restrictions combined with generics thrown in for good measure (AsyncTask embedding in an activity and updating result in the activity). Go features are clearly specified in a very readable and fairly concise spec and guide and its features fit seamlessly together virtually every time​
• im_down_w_otp 10y ago
  I experience this depression constantly. It's very rare to find people or places using Erlang, the community is extremely small and seemingly getting smaller all the time, and new things attempting to approximate its core strengths (often badly or incompletely) keep coming to the market and only further exacerbating the situation. So I end up stuck working with crappier tech, crappier tools, and dealing with the effects of fewer and fewer resources going into improving the last 5% of annoying things about Erlang. While a deluge of resources go into partially reinventing the first 50% of it over and over again in some other random language.
  • im_down_w_otp 10y ago
    Having now read the entirety of the originally linked post... I'm doubly depressed. Erlang would have been a great fit for Pusher's problem space. Blargh! :-(
  • Veen 10y ago
    What are your thoughts on Elixir?
    • im_down_w_otp 10y ago
      It's fine. Parts of it seem really weird to me. Agents don't seem like they should be in the standard library. The pipe operator should probably have some sugar for representing the first implicit argument to the function because it's weird to have things like Enum.map/2 become written as Enum.map/1 in that context. Protocols are bizarrely complex (you can do the same thing in Erlang with about 10% of the ceremony) and made weirder by the fact that structs are represented as maps with a special key instead of as records, so field access and key walking has an unnecessary amount of overhead comparatively. It doesn't feel "complete", because there are pretty big chunks of the underlying system that still make you extremely aware you're really running atop Erlang (debugging, tracing, profiling, etc.), up to and including the docs themselves which often just point you straight to the relevant Erlang documentation. I like that it has brought a lot of new energy to the BEAM ecosystem. I like the tooling and focus on docs and testing that have come with it. I like the macro system, even though I think it's overused by the community and often to ill effect, but the system itself is much cleaner than Erlang's. tl;dr... Sure, why not. :-)