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I actually think it's a lot more about initial training. and corporate sponsorship. People would rather die/retire than change how they program. The assembly g

by hajile 3y ago

I actually think it's a lot more about initial training. and corporate sponsorship. People would rather die/retire than change how they program. The assembly guys died/retired rather than learn structured languages. The imperative people died/retired rather than learn OOP. The OOP people are currently dying/retiring as languages shift to be much more functional. ALL of these things have existed for 50+ years, so why did they take so long to adopt (as people now almost universally agree these things are better)? It's all about what they are taught and use early on in their career. With the exception of 5-10% of outliers, everyone takes what they learned in school, adds a little more past that as they are learning to code, then cement their synapses into that pattern for the rest of their career. A conflating factor here is corporate backing. If you look at the popular programming languages, only a couple became successful without a large corporate sponsor. Corporations tend to be conservative in their investments too. This creates a secondary effect where even when you encounter a superior language pattern, you cannot use it because your company isn't likely to pay you to rewrite complex libraries in a new language. JS pushed the world so far toward functional programming because even though it was different, it was the only standard. OOP devs in the 90s and 00s would rather die/retire than actually learn JS and more functional programming paradigms. But because it was the standard, big companies like Google and MS were forced to pour in resources and make it accessible. In turn, that has led to a glut of functional features being bolted on to other languages now that a generation of programmers has adopted them. I'd hypothesize that if Eich had made a Scheme instead of JS (as he originally intended), we wouldn't be having this debate today. It would have forced corporate backing of a lisp and of a functional language. The current crop of devs would have been introduced to both of these ways of thinking and nobody would question the merits of a lisp-like language compared to ALGOL/C derivatives that have been foisted into mainstream education and corporate support for the last 50+ years.

pjc50 3y ago
> This creates a secondary effect where even when you encounter a superior language pattern, you cannot use it because your company isn't likely to pay you to rewrite complex libraries in a new language I think the software dying or retiring is perhaps a more important factor than the developers, who can be flexible if the money/kudos is there for them. Rust has been picked up in various places to "forcibly retire" C/C++ programs which have had too many CVEs in their lifetimes; the only reason they were not retired earlier is the lack of a language with the required properties. If there was a bug-free highly performant implementation of SSL that existed in Lisp, that might be a thing that encouraged people to take a look at adopting it despite their lack of familiarity. > ALL of these things have existed for 50+ years Especially Lisp. Lisp has been around for a long time. At this point I think it's suffering from a "true communism has never been tried" argument which overlooks that people have tried it and takeoff has not been achieved, and its advocates continue to blame everyone else (as in your post) rather than engage in a little introspection or reflection. > I'd hypothesize that if Eich had made a Scheme instead of JS (as he originally intended) As the world turns, WASM now has a canonical format in S-expressions.
- hajile 3y ago
  I’ve seen the programmer battles over programming paradigms in years past. They’ll pick inferior tech simply because it’s what they know. I’d argue that alternatives to C/C++ exist, but they aren’t so C-Like, so nobody wanted to try them. Unlike communism, Lisp has been successful at pretty much every place it’s been tried until someone showed up and demanded everyone change to their preferred language. Ironically, WASM is the least usable “lisp” ever created because of its stack design.
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
> People would rather die/retire than change how they program As the saying goes, academia advances one funeral at a time.
- tiffanyg 3y ago
  More strongly (and accurately, I think): The world advances one funeral at a time. Good saying, in any case, however strongly one wishes to phrase it. :)
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
> The OOP people are currently dying/retiring as languages shift to be much more functional. I don't know what programming language landscape you're looking at, but to me it doesn't look like that at all. I grant you that more and more languages are getting functional bits glued on. That doesn't make them FP languages, though. And my perception is that they aren't being used as FP languages. They're being used as other-paradigm languages that can do a bit of FP when desired. If people actually wanted an FP language, they'd switch to one. And they aren't.

by hajile 3y ago

pjc50 3y ago

> This creates a secondary effect where even when you encounter a superior language pattern, you cannot use it because your company isn't likely to pay you to rewrite complex libraries in a new language I think the software dying or retiring is perhaps a more important factor than the developers, who can be flexible if the money/kudos is there for them. Rust has been picked up in various places to "forcibly retire" C/C++ programs which have had too many CVEs in their lifetimes; the only reason they were not retired earlier is the lack of a language with the required properties. If there was a bug-free highly performant implementation of SSL that existed in Lisp, that might be a thing that encouraged people to take a look at adopting it despite their lack of familiarity. > ALL of these things have existed for 50+ years Especially Lisp. Lisp has been around for a long time. At this point I think it's suffering from a "true communism has never been tried" argument which overlooks that people have tried it and takeoff has not been achieved, and its advocates continue to blame everyone else (as in your post) rather than engage in a little introspection or reflection. > I'd hypothesize that if Eich had made a Scheme instead of JS (as he originally intended) As the world turns, WASM now has a canonical format in S-expressions.

hajile 3y ago
I’ve seen the programmer battles over programming paradigms in years past. They’ll pick inferior tech simply because it’s what they know. I’d argue that alternatives to C/C++ exist, but they aren’t so C-Like, so nobody wanted to try them. Unlike communism, Lisp has been successful at pretty much every place it’s been tried until someone showed up and demanded everyone change to their preferred language. Ironically, WASM is the least usable “lisp” ever created because of its stack design.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago

> People would rather die/retire than change how they program As the saying goes, academia advances one funeral at a time.

tiffanyg 3y ago
More strongly (and accurately, I think): The world advances one funeral at a time. Good saying, in any case, however strongly one wishes to phrase it. :)

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

> The OOP people are currently dying/retiring as languages shift to be much more functional. I don't know what programming language landscape you're looking at, but to me it doesn't look like that at all. I grant you that more and more languages are getting functional bits glued on. That doesn't make them FP languages, though. And my perception is that they aren't being used as FP languages. They're being used as other-paradigm languages that can do a bit of FP when desired. If people actually wanted an FP language, they'd switch to one. And they aren't.