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The "fungible programmer" theory [0] is one of the better explanations for the unpopularity of languages like Haskell and Lisp. Ultimately, making software that

The "fungible programmer" theory [0] is one of the better explanations for the unpopularity of languages like Haskell and Lisp. Ultimately, making software that's large enough will become an organizational problem as well as technical one, and developers will get funged into being blub programmers [1], though RoR is a pretty nice way to do that all things considered. I would argue Go was designed for maximum fungibility. [0] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=69 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=69 [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Karrot_Kream 4y ago
Lol the fungible programmer theory is one of the most disrespectful theories of programmer choice out there. It assumes that, by default, everyone is a bad programmer and that only people that use "non-blub languages" are good programmers. Blub itself is vaguely defined or generally never defined rigorously. I never find a theory that has contempt for so much of an industry has any real explanatory benefit.
- astrange 4y ago
  It's largely a demonstration that if you give pg an incredible amount of money by accidentally inventing online stores, he will develop an incredible ego and decide it was all due to his personal technical brilliance.
- rileyphone 4y ago
  It's not necessarily that they are worse programmers, but rather represent the industrialization of building software, as outlined by Brad Cox [0]. Partially driving this is the shorter tenure of today's software engineers. How many beautiful things have had to be completely rewritten because the original creator had left, and no one could grok it? Not that there is no way to reconcile fungibility with expressiveness and beauty, but the tradeoffs involved are tricky and will always end up disappointing somebody. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3246772_Planning_the_software_industrial_revolution https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3246772_Planning_th...

Karrot_Kream 4y ago

Lol the fungible programmer theory is one of the most disrespectful theories of programmer choice out there. It assumes that, by default, everyone is a bad programmer and that only people that use "non-blub languages" are good programmers. Blub itself is vaguely defined or generally never defined rigorously. I never find a theory that has contempt for so much of an industry has any real explanatory benefit.

astrange 4y ago
It's largely a demonstration that if you give pg an incredible amount of money by accidentally inventing online stores, he will develop an incredible ego and decide it was all due to his personal technical brilliance.
rileyphone 4y ago
It's not necessarily that they are worse programmers, but rather represent the industrialization of building software, as outlined by Brad Cox [0]. Partially driving this is the shorter tenure of today's software engineers. How many beautiful things have had to be completely rewritten because the original creator had left, and no one could grok it? Not that there is no way to reconcile fungibility with expressiveness and beauty, but the tradeoffs involved are tricky and will always end up disappointing somebody. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3246772_Planning_the_software_industrial_revolution https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3246772_Planning_th...