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Programming is about expressing how to solve a problem. Of course different ways to express that will fit different people. Every time I see people trying to pu
by Zababa 5y ago
Programming is about expressing how to solve a problem. Of course different ways to express that will fit different people. Every time I see people trying to push "that language is the best!", I see people trying to have a language as the only spoken and written language in the world, and I find that incredibly sad. People shape languages, languages shape people. Seeing someone that's very comfortable with a certain programming style that's not the one that you're used too usually means that you can learn a lot by talking to them.
When you look at programming as a form of communication, it's easier to understand a lot of things. You can't build your tower of Babel with thousands of people if you all talk different languages in different ways, you need something that can be understood easily by everyone. But that's also not the language you would use when writing something deeply personal.
- scns 5y agoInteresting, drawing parllels to religion here. In the end it might be our genes and the inherent tribalism driving us to behave that way, while thinking we are rational agents. There is an essay about it IIRC, the Lambda tribe and the Machine tribe.
- Zababa 5y agoTalking about things I don't really understand here, but there's a nice parallel to draw to Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Same thing with the blind men and the elephant, or 2D lizards that see a cube pass through their dimension. Maybe we're cursed to only ever see part of the truth, and only be able to understand part of it. Maybe there's no single "truth" at all and we have to learn to deal with this.
- scns 5y agoWe are not cursed, we just can't see it. Immanuel Kant called reality "Das Ding an sich", which i can try to translate as "The thing in itself". He showed, that since we perceive reality via our senses, which are easily fooled, we can never be sure that we perceive reality as it really is.