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I wish I could just stick with a language forever and thoroughly master it. What did Bruce Lee say about it? He didn’t fear the man that practiced 1000 differen

I wish I could just stick with a language forever and thoroughly master it. What did Bruce Lee say about it? He didn’t fear the man that practiced 1000 different kicks. He feared the man that practiced the same kick 1000 times. Something like that. The industry fetishizes the constant stream of new languages and frameworks, primarily based on nothing more than the fear of “falling behind”. It’s dumb, and essays such as the “blub programmer” feeds into it.

mumblemumble 4y ago
The one thing that scares me about that sentiment, which otherwise I mostly share, is that "forever languages" tend to become kitchen sink languages. Typically to their detriment.
- culi 4y ago
  You can learn a language just to explore new ways of thinking and eventually return back to your kitchen sink language. I think it's worth learning a lisp, a functional language, a logic pl, or something from some other paradigm you don't typically use. Maybe do a side project in it. The lessons you learn will surely make you a better programmer overall even if you don't maintain your mastery of it
osigurdson 4y ago
There is nothing abstract about a kick however. A programming language is always an abstraction, with different languages optimizing for different things. Understanding more than one is helpful imo. The “Bruce Lee” of programming would definitely use assembler and deeply understand computer architecture at a fundamental level. The idiom of Bruce Lee is someone who is hyper passionate about their craft.
heavyset_go 4y ago
Nothing really stops you from doing that, as long as you're still willing to learn other languages, libraries, paradigms and whatnot that are needed to get stuff done. I consult as an X "expert", but have worked, and do work, extensively with tools outside of X's scope.
echelon 4y ago
No language will stay with us forever, as the types of problems we solve will change. You might think that C would be a contender for a long-lived language, but what about a world where humans don't do the code writing anymore? Languages are scaffolds. You need them for a time, then you build around it and are onto something new. Everything changes. Time will ultimately wash all that we consider permanent away.
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  As a language that celebrated its 50th birthday this year, C is already a long-lived language. It's not terribly far behind the first non-research compiled language, Fortran, which celebrated its 65th birthday this year. Both are, for all practical purposes, immortal languages at this point. You correctly point out that they aren't guaranteed to survive the next technological mass extinction event, but I think that might just be a truism.
  - echelon 4y ago
    I think we're about to enter an era where more code will be written on an annual basis than all previously existing written code. The same holds for music, art, photos.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"I wish I could just stick with a language and thoroughly master it." Assembler, C and shell script have been and will be around for many years. As an end user, i.e., someone who runs programs more than she reads/writes/edits them, I find Python's startup time is just too slow. I have a folder full of tiny, fast shell scripts and C programs that I rely on year after year. Replacing this with a folder full of Python scripts is difficult to envision. Assembler, C and shell script will still be ubiquitous and foundational no matter what subsequent programming language hype comes over the internet. Boring stuff that works. I am typing this comment from a program written in C. "The industry" (cf. the end user) seems to have endless time to burn because the stuff it promotes through hype always presents a massive timekill to those who embrace it. A conspiracy theorist might imagine that the industry is trying to keep itself busy and maintain peoples' attention. Regardless of intent, that seems to be the end result. It is like that hardware company that wants people to keep buying new computers every few years, and tries to prevent/discourage anyone from repairing and retaining them.
the_af 4y ago
> It’s dumb, and essays such as the “blub programmer” feeds into it I don't think the Blub essay is about learning a constant stream of new languages. I mean, the author of the essay doesn't seem to be constantly learning new languages. The Blub essay, whatever its flaws may be, is about people being unaware of languages and features more advanced than their tool of choice, and finding them strange. Or in other words, that it's easy to see how poorer tools are more limited than the ones you're using, but very hard to understand how better tools are better, or even acknowledge they are better at all.
CraigJPerry 4y ago
If you’re creating the language, i totally see the value but If you’re just a user of a given language then there’s always going to be more value to be extracted from advancing your knowledge of computation instead of any one lang. If your business is trying to solve hard problem X and your best idea is to use this tricky advanced language feature and then apply these compiler flags… then you’re going to lose to the person who knows of a programming paradigm (e.g. logic programming) unlocking a simpler solution or a data structure unlocking a more performant solution. That sounds a bit abstract. To make it more concrete - imagine a problem where you need to apply a function in concurrent windows over a time series but you’ve never experienced any of the array programming languages.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

mumblemumble 4y ago

The one thing that scares me about that sentiment, which otherwise I mostly share, is that "forever languages" tend to become kitchen sink languages. Typically to their detriment.

culi 4y ago
You can learn a language just to explore new ways of thinking and eventually return back to your kitchen sink language. I think it's worth learning a lisp, a functional language, a logic pl, or something from some other paradigm you don't typically use. Maybe do a side project in it. The lessons you learn will surely make you a better programmer overall even if you don't maintain your mastery of it

osigurdson 4y ago

There is nothing abstract about a kick however. A programming language is always an abstraction, with different languages optimizing for different things. Understanding more than one is helpful imo. The “Bruce Lee” of programming would definitely use assembler and deeply understand computer architecture at a fundamental level. The idiom of Bruce Lee is someone who is hyper passionate about their craft.

heavyset_go 4y ago

Nothing really stops you from doing that, as long as you're still willing to learn other languages, libraries, paradigms and whatnot that are needed to get stuff done. I consult as an X "expert", but have worked, and do work, extensively with tools outside of X's scope.

echelon 4y ago

No language will stay with us forever, as the types of problems we solve will change. You might think that C would be a contender for a long-lived language, but what about a world where humans don't do the code writing anymore? Languages are scaffolds. You need them for a time, then you build around it and are onto something new. Everything changes. Time will ultimately wash all that we consider permanent away.

mumblemumble 4y ago
As a language that celebrated its 50th birthday this year, C is already a long-lived language. It's not terribly far behind the first non-research compiled language, Fortran, which celebrated its 65th birthday this year. Both are, for all practical purposes, immortal languages at this point. You correctly point out that they aren't guaranteed to survive the next technological mass extinction event, but I think that might just be a truism.
- echelon 4y ago
  I think we're about to enter an era where more code will be written on an annual basis than all previously existing written code. The same holds for music, art, photos.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"I wish I could just stick with a language and thoroughly master it." Assembler, C and shell script have been and will be around for many years. As an end user, i.e., someone who runs programs more than she reads/writes/edits them, I find Python's startup time is just too slow. I have a folder full of tiny, fast shell scripts and C programs that I rely on year after year. Replacing this with a folder full of Python scripts is difficult to envision. Assembler, C and shell script will still be ubiquitous and foundational no matter what subsequent programming language hype comes over the internet. Boring stuff that works. I am typing this comment from a program written in C. "The industry" (cf. the end user) seems to have endless time to burn because the stuff it promotes through hype always presents a massive timekill to those who embrace it. A conspiracy theorist might imagine that the industry is trying to keep itself busy and maintain peoples' attention. Regardless of intent, that seems to be the end result. It is like that hardware company that wants people to keep buying new computers every few years, and tries to prevent/discourage anyone from repairing and retaining them.

the_af 4y ago

> It’s dumb, and essays such as the “blub programmer” feeds into it I don't think the Blub essay is about learning a constant stream of new languages. I mean, the author of the essay doesn't seem to be constantly learning new languages. The Blub essay, whatever its flaws may be, is about people being unaware of languages and features more advanced than their tool of choice, and finding them strange. Or in other words, that it's easy to see how poorer tools are more limited than the ones you're using, but very hard to understand how better tools are better, or even acknowledge they are better at all.

CraigJPerry 4y ago

If you’re creating the language, i totally see the value but If you’re just a user of a given language then there’s always going to be more value to be extracted from advancing your knowledge of computation instead of any one lang. If your business is trying to solve hard problem X and your best idea is to use this tricky advanced language feature and then apply these compiler flags… then you’re going to lose to the person who knows of a programming paradigm (e.g. logic programming) unlocking a simpler solution or a data structure unlocking a more performant solution. That sounds a bit abstract. To make it more concrete - imagine a problem where you need to apply a function in concurrent windows over a time series but you’ve never experienced any of the array programming languages.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]