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> Hear hear! Building bona-fide compilers that have interesting concepts, or just for fun, is a worthwhile thing to do. But these one-off languages are becoming

> Hear hear! Building bona-fide compilers that have interesting concepts, or just for fun, is a worthwhile thing to do. But these one-off languages are becoming ridiculous. I don't understand this mentality. Some programmers enjoy writing programs and some enjoy learning about programming languages. No one is telling all programmers they they need to learn about every programming language, but why paint the whole endeavor as frivolous?

zamalek 4y ago
From what you quoted: > Building bona-fide compilers that have interesting concepts, or just for fun, is a worthwhile thing to do.
dijit 4y ago
I've been a sysadmin (now, devops, SRE, whatever) for over 15 years now, so when you say: > No one is telling all programmers they they need to learn about every programming language I cringe a little. There are about 25 different DSL's in my head from configuring various desired state configuration systems or services which use DSLs, there's countless config file formats ranging for ZONE files to TOML to YAML to HCL and on and on and on. Makefiles, Dockerfiles, Ninja files, Jenkinsfiles etc;etc;etc;etc; DevOps of Yore had to know bash and perl, then it was Ruby, then python, now Go. The treadmill continues, it's _necessary_ to learn those things because you _must_ interact with those things. That's before we get into special languages like AWK which had significant prominence when I was beginning life as a sysadmin too. Nobody is forcing programmers to know every language, but honestly, there's a lot that sysadmins had to learn, and with the rise of DevOps, developers are the SysAdmins of tomorrow: so you have to know what we knew.
- yessirwhatever 4y ago
  I feel your tiredness. But I don't understand why you'd say it'd make you cringe. You can have a discussion about how the industry (usually motivated by non-technical reasons) is moving towards. I was talking specifically about those "one-off" languages that some people find fun to investigate and/or work on.
  - dijit 4y ago
    I cringe because you said that programmers don’t have to learn many languages. But in order to do a good job a sysadmin has to learn the semantics of dozens. So you’re right, in a way, but it’s not right at all for sysadmins. Since sysadmins are being essentially replaced by programmers, it won’t be right for programmers soon either.

zamalek 4y ago

From what you quoted: > Building bona-fide compilers that have interesting concepts, or just for fun, is a worthwhile thing to do.

dijit 4y ago

I've been a sysadmin (now, devops, SRE, whatever) for over 15 years now, so when you say: > No one is telling all programmers they they need to learn about every programming language I cringe a little. There are about 25 different DSL's in my head from configuring various desired state configuration systems or services which use DSLs, there's countless config file formats ranging for ZONE files to TOML to YAML to HCL and on and on and on. Makefiles, Dockerfiles, Ninja files, Jenkinsfiles etc;etc;etc;etc; DevOps of Yore had to know bash and perl, then it was Ruby, then python, now Go. The treadmill continues, it's _necessary_ to learn those things because you _must_ interact with those things. That's before we get into special languages like AWK which had significant prominence when I was beginning life as a sysadmin too. Nobody is forcing programmers to know every language, but honestly, there's a lot that sysadmins had to learn, and with the rise of DevOps, developers are the SysAdmins of tomorrow: so you have to know what we knew.

yessirwhatever 4y ago
I feel your tiredness. But I don't understand why you'd say it'd make you cringe. You can have a discussion about how the industry (usually motivated by non-technical reasons) is moving towards. I was talking specifically about those "one-off" languages that some people find fun to investigate and/or work on.
- dijit 4y ago
  I cringe because you said that programmers don’t have to learn many languages. But in order to do a good job a sysadmin has to learn the semantics of dozens. So you’re right, in a way, but it’s not right at all for sysadmins. Since sysadmins are being essentially replaced by programmers, it won’t be right for programmers soon either.