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There's no way to do this kind of list without infecting it with author bias. I'm a Rubyist, I like pure-OO, so what's interesting to me is language interop, so

There's no way to do this kind of list without infecting it with author bias. I'm a Rubyist, I like pure-OO, so what's interesting to me is language interop, so that I can get all the benefits of pure OO along with speed, and tooling so that you can get through the mass of context that is understanding the standard library and available libs so you don't have to build literally everything from scratch or spend 90% of your time in Google. So I went looking for Pharo, which brings fascinating introspective tooling to Smalltalk, only to find that the author is biased towards 'any' high level features interoperating with C-like languages. And my list of interesting languages would look the same way, nobody would be able to see why I didn't put 'their' language on there. Which is why I got excited for the awesome list thing. One person can't curate everything. You need a community of people invested in differentiating software offerings to the point where anybody can look at it and see what makes it interesting.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> There's no way to do this kind of list without infecting it with author bias Well, “interesting” is subjective so it always is going to incorporate someone's opinion, but it doesn't have to be the author’s bias, e.g., if it was based, say, on surveying a wide and representative pool of developers.
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  I think about the concept of rationality a lot, and you touch upon a frequent topic of rumination. Does interestingness always have to be subjective? I don't think so, I think we can reduce it down to the contextual, and identify an ideal middle ground between the two. In that, we can make objective judgments that, given some context, a particular item sticks out and is therefore interesting. And that any interested curator could look at any new entrant and discover almost immediately what makes it interesting. I think many machine language workloads boil down to searching for signal amongst noise. A human can then go look at the anomalies. I wouldn't want a survey of a bunch of coders barely interested in curation. I want the guys who have been dealing with these things their entire careers and really care about the differences. Not quite fully-automated discovery, but with a minimum of human fuss and a maximum of deliverable rational information.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> There's no way to do this kind of list without infecting it with author bias Well, “interesting” is subjective so it always is going to incorporate someone's opinion, but it doesn't have to be the author’s bias, e.g., if it was based, say, on surveying a wide and representative pool of developers.

vinceguidry 7y ago
I think about the concept of rationality a lot, and you touch upon a frequent topic of rumination. Does interestingness always have to be subjective? I don't think so, I think we can reduce it down to the contextual, and identify an ideal middle ground between the two. In that, we can make objective judgments that, given some context, a particular item sticks out and is therefore interesting. And that any interested curator could look at any new entrant and discover almost immediately what makes it interesting. I think many machine language workloads boil down to searching for signal amongst noise. A human can then go look at the anomalies. I wouldn't want a survey of a bunch of coders barely interested in curation. I want the guys who have been dealing with these things their entire careers and really care about the differences. Not quite fully-automated discovery, but with a minimum of human fuss and a maximum of deliverable rational information.