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"Snobs" sparked off this chain of reasoning for me: - Snobs have overly critical attitudes (by definition). - Overly critical attitudes cause perfectionism.
by 13ren 18y ago
"Snobs" sparked off this chain of reasoning for me:
- Snobs have overly critical attitudes (by definition).
- Overly critical attitudes cause perfectionism.
- Perfectionism causes procrastination, because if you haven't actually done anything, you can't be criticized (especially not by yourself).
So it seems inevitable that language snobs would not produce much work (note: there any plenty people using the languages listed who do created finished work - one could claim that these people, in general, are noted for not having overly critical attitudes, and hence are not language snobs).
- brlewis 18y agoIt's possible you're right in general, but as a counterexample note that the working code you and I are using to post these comments was written by someone whose attitude toward existing Lisp dialects was critical enough to make him want to write his own.
- 13ren 18y agoDid he spend his energy being critical of them, or on working on a dialect that he found valuable?
- brlewis 18y agoI don't know how much energy he spent implementing Arc, but the energy he spent before Arc's release writing critically of existing dialects was at least as much as you might see "language snobs" expend. My point is, you can't deduce from someone's highly critical attitude that they won't produce useful code.
- 13ren 18y agoYou could well be right (that a highly critical attitude does not prevent writing of useful code). But relating it back to "snobbery" - which I think is a highly critical attitude and "therefore I'm better than you" - I don't think PG was damning the other dialects, but was criticizing specific aspects while appreciating other aspects (maybe: "this is really cool, but the syntax is annoying", "they had a great idea here, but implemented it stupidly"). I haven't read the essays in question, so it would be an interesting test to have a look...[time passes]... I just scanned the articles under under "lisp" on PG's site, and didn't see any criticism of lisp - only praise. While I'm sure that his criticism of Lisp exists, praise also does, so I think his highly critical attitude towards lisp dialects was not in order to claim that Arc is fundamentally superior, but to improve on some specific aspects.
- Hexstream 18y ago"Perfectionism causes procrastination, because if you haven't actually done anything, you can't be criticized (especially not by yourself)." What about criticizing yourself for not doing anything?
- 13ren 18y agoIn your experience, is criticizing yourself for not doing anything as effective as focusing on what encourages and inspires, and energizes you?