6 ms·

A lot depends on the programming language used in the online tech materials. It's very hard to find anything worthy in Python or JS, because for many people it'

A lot depends on the programming language used in the online tech materials. It's very hard to find anything worthy in Python or JS, because for many people it's their first language, and "teachers" are only one lesson ahead of their "students". On the other hand reading something explained in OCaml, Scheme, Erlang, Julia, D or similar niche and not hyped language can be of very high quality. C also tends to be good. Interestingly, C++ is also slowly becoming a niche high-quality language recently.

RNCTX 6y ago
This is just flat out false. You're showing your (lack of) age here. The nature of niche languages is people who like them run to the next niche when the next niche springs from the aether. And when their blogs and youtube channnels die, so will they wither on the vine. There has always been higher quality documentation for Python things than most languages, because as a community, Python encourages quality documentation by providing tools to help developers write it more efficiently. There are quite literally entire platforms that teach a complete beginner who has never written a line of code how to write javascript, for free. There's a difference in having good documentation, and someone reading the documentation to you. Sounds like you're equating the latter with the former. You realize C++ has been around since 1979, right?
- a-nikolaev 6y ago
  Okay old man, show me your age and knowledge: do you know about Oleg Kiselyov and his amazing articles? See here: http://okmij.org/ftp/ http://okmij.org/ftp/
  - RNCTX 6y ago
    It's not my age and knowledge, it has been this way since before I was born in the case of the derivatives of C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_most_popular_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_... The most ubiquitous languages used in the most highly trafficked websites in the world are Javascript (1995), PHP (1995), Python (1990), C++ (1979), and Java (1994). No, I do not keep up with individuals' blogs and articles. I am very familiar with the O'Reilly books mentioned by one of their authors in another comment in this thread, however. And it's a universally accepted truth at this point that Stackoverflow and blogs are poor replacements for them.
    - a-nikolaev 6y ago
      Your argument is weak. Popularity of a language does not correlate well with the average knowledge of the users of the language. OCaml and Scheme are both very old languages. The original dialect of OCaml (Robin Milner's ML) was created in 1973. Scheme was also created around the same time in the 1970s, and Lisp even earlier, so the technology I refer to is hardly a novelty from aether. Rather, the opposite is true, they are all older than Python, JS, and the derivatives of C. People using these less popular languages are not blogging/posting a lot, spending more time writing code. Nevertheless, most online discussion is high-quality with high signal-to-noise ratio, much easier to learn new things, find good code and smart people.
      - lispm 6y ago
        Actually both ML and Scheme were at first implemented in Lisp.
        a-nikolaev 6y ago
        Yeah

RNCTX 6y ago

This is just flat out false. You're showing your (lack of) age here. The nature of niche languages is people who like them run to the next niche when the next niche springs from the aether. And when their blogs and youtube channnels die, so will they wither on the vine. There has always been higher quality documentation for Python things than most languages, because as a community, Python encourages quality documentation by providing tools to help developers write it more efficiently. There are quite literally entire platforms that teach a complete beginner who has never written a line of code how to write javascript, for free. There's a difference in having good documentation, and someone reading the documentation to you. Sounds like you're equating the latter with the former. You realize C++ has been around since 1979, right?

a-nikolaev 6y ago
Okay old man, show me your age and knowledge: do you know about Oleg Kiselyov and his amazing articles? See here: http://okmij.org/ftp/ http://okmij.org/ftp/
- RNCTX 6y ago
  It's not my age and knowledge, it has been this way since before I was born in the case of the derivatives of C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_most_popular_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_... The most ubiquitous languages used in the most highly trafficked websites in the world are Javascript (1995), PHP (1995), Python (1990), C++ (1979), and Java (1994). No, I do not keep up with individuals' blogs and articles. I am very familiar with the O'Reilly books mentioned by one of their authors in another comment in this thread, however. And it's a universally accepted truth at this point that Stackoverflow and blogs are poor replacements for them.
  - a-nikolaev 6y ago
    Your argument is weak. Popularity of a language does not correlate well with the average knowledge of the users of the language. OCaml and Scheme are both very old languages. The original dialect of OCaml (Robin Milner's ML) was created in 1973. Scheme was also created around the same time in the 1970s, and Lisp even earlier, so the technology I refer to is hardly a novelty from aether. Rather, the opposite is true, they are all older than Python, JS, and the derivatives of C. People using these less popular languages are not blogging/posting a lot, spending more time writing code. Nevertheless, most online discussion is high-quality with high signal-to-noise ratio, much easier to learn new things, find good code and smart people.
    - lispm 6y ago
      Actually both ML and Scheme were at first implemented in Lisp.
      - a-nikolaev 6y ago
        Yeah