> I would not dismiss an article without at least trying to make a genuine effort to understand the point an article makes. And likewise, you didn't seem to u

> I would not dismiss an article without at least trying to make a genuine effort to understand the point an article makes. And likewise, you didn't seem to understand michaelmrose's points and your reply didn't address his specific criticisms of the article and how it has 2 flaws. To me, your restatement has repeated the same 2 flaws: >most efforts do not move us forward but instead move us backwards because fewer people are working on the things that matter. It's a solid argument It's not a solid argument and the 2 flaws in O'Callahan's essay are: (1) Post hoc analysis flaw: Judging what moves us "forward" vs "backwards" is post hoc analysis. It requires a time machine. In reality, we always live in the present moment, and therefore, we can't know what inconsequential things today will eventually be a net benefit to society tomorrow. (2) Fungible & zero sum flaw. That a human interest level in any given activity is fungible and therefore zero-sum which supposedly takes away from other more worthy things. To apply the flawed thinking to the C Language, we would have to transport ourselves back to 1972 and O'Callahan would then criticize Dennis Ritchie for "inventing yet another language and fragmenting the landscape". Instead, D.R. should have focused his effort on languages that already existed like Cobol (1959) and Lisp (1958). Well, if Dennis Ritchie was not intellectually interested in enhancing the older ecosystems of Cobol and Lisp, it's a moot point. Imagine taking all those "Shown HN" posts of new programming languages[1] and lecturing people that they should have focusd their energy on existing "more important" things such as the broken C code in Heartbleed OpenSSL. That advice would be naive about human nature. Many people aren't interested in working on the OpenSSL codebase. If one believes that "video games" are a waste of time, it's flawed to assume that a programmer's 1000 hours on a "useless" game engine could have been redirected on developing algorithms for DNA analysis or writing code for a government healthcare portal to help the nation's citizens. Motivations matter. Similar arguments can be made for scientists choosing to working on particular problems in physics, math, and engineering. E.g. It was a "waste of time" for Andrew Wiles to work on Fermat's Last Theorem when "P=NP" is the "more important" problem. Well, the he worked on it because Fermat's problem fascinated him since he was a little boy and "P!=NP" didn't grip him in the same passionate way. > and the long term commitment should be there if you [...] , it means that once your programming language gains adoption beyond some people playing around with it you can't just walk off and say that it isn't your problem. I just wanted to note that this particular opinion of "language inventor's ongoing commitment required" was not stated in O'Callahan's essay. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=show%20hn%20programming%20language&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=show%20hn%20programming%20lang...