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Languages like Lisp, APL, and Haskell reward extraordinary skill with extraordinary power. If you're a researcher or an early-stage startup founder, that's grea
by closeparen 7y ago
Languages like Lisp, APL, and Haskell reward extraordinary skill with extraordinary power. If you're a researcher or an early-stage startup founder, that's great. You want your little band of geniuses to have the maximum possible leverage.
But if you're an engineering leader at a large company, the last thing you want is an asset in your portfolio that only extraordinarily skilled people can work on. What if they quit? What if your company's stature declines and you can't attract such people anymore? What if a more pressing problem comes along and you want to deploy them elsewhere?
So we get languages with short learning curves and low ceilings (Go!) instead.
Except in performance critical contexts, where it can’t be helped, but C++ already won that one.
- RookyNumbas 7y agoThis seems correct to me. The last two things I've learned were javscript/node/react and Haskell. I had never touched js or html before, but within two days I had a pretty decent web app up and running. It was something that could (and did) provided value for a business. Two days after starting Haskell I had essentially nothing to show for it except a feeling that I has a huge amount to learn before I could be productive. Even a year later I still have a huge amount to learn.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- stefan_ 7y agoNo, that's not it. The world is not run by functional programming languages, despite their "leverage". The word you are looking for is "quirky". Of course, the same is true for the programmers. They are not extraordinarily smart, they make quirky technical decisions. Interest in functional programming solves technical problems as much as your choice of editor.
- zbentley 7y agoI don't think that extraordinary skill and power are linked at the language level. Within a rounding error, an "extraordinarily skilled" developer can probably be just as much of an asset to a company with an "extraordinarily powerful" language as they could with an "ordinarily powerful" (read: mainstream) one. Now, super-skilled folks might like playing with Lisp or Haskell or what-have-you (and if it affects your ability to retain them and get value from them, you might want to let them), but their skilled-ness is usually transferable to other languages if the need arises.
- closeparen 7y agoHm. Do you think that the expressiveness of the language you’re working in doesn’t actually influence the scale of what one person can build with it? Or that mainstream languages already have the maximum expressive power and these are just lateral moves?
- fulafel 7y agoI think Lisp doesn't belong in this set in many cases (eg Clojure, Racket), it's pretty easy to learn and use compared to eg JavaScript.