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Did he spend his energy being critical of them, or on working on a dialect that he found valuable?
by 13ren 18y ago
Did 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.