3 ms·

Some thoughts in no particular order: 1. FWIW, the older I get the larger a fraction of EWDs I disagree with. 2. If you take something wrong and reverse it yo

• kodoman 2mo ago
  Thank you for your thoughts and I actually agree with you a lot and don't think many of these points actually contradict what I was saying. (I was not defending the notion of the elite status of lisp programmers, but the notion that elites exist can be unsavory (or perfectly pleasant) and should be valued for their skills. Your first point I agree with I think Dijkstra was wrong about a lot of things, but I think that the idea of elegance and looking to mathematics and privileging a mathematical way of thinking in programming language design and perhaps by extension operating system design is something I thinks is valuable and it could simply be said that are disagreement with Dijkstra that we both have are simply born of the corruption of computing that has occurred through unrigorous thinking. It's hard to apply many of Dijkstra's ideas to a program written for a unix or unix like system because these systems from the get go privileged a sort of hacky and pragmatic way of solving computing issues (unix cultures of course having their own elitist culture). On your second point I would concede that Democratization can simply mean opening up the possibility of people gaining skills without gate keeping institutions, My first point is that particularly recently (past 8 years or so) deskilling seems to be meant by it at least partially and as of very recently much more explicitly and maybe even deskill at the expense of giving opportunities to poorer people (think about the ways that AI make it easier for a wealthy person to get their computing done but might do nothing for poorer people how could not afford LLM tokens or local hardware. Finally it's also the case that gatekeeping it's self is a power that most professions have and it's part of their power (think about lawyers or doctors) I don't think this is strictly negative and can also help foster rules of the craft and dedication to the craft and improving it. On the third point, I agree and I think JavaScript is quite explicitly inspired by lisp's and the notion that Lexical closures are some sort of mystical concept that requires deep meditation is silly on the other hand front-end programmers have earned intuition on these concepts and something like a deep meditation on working with react or what ever framework does require constant learning and might be in some way enlightened on how to write good components (as someone who is not a front end developer who has written some front-end javascript for various projects my code can be quite poor and no doubt much poorer then what a professional front end developer would right. On point 5 I largely agree but I think that sometimes something like the kind of elite culture of haskell did produce some good in that it let people work on new ideas and build things that would not otherwise be built starting from pure functional programming would be a hard sell for a mainstream language and using haskell effectively probably does require some ability to grok some bits of theory that many would not (Basic Catagory theory, Abstract Algebra, Thinking more deeply about lambda calculus and purely functional algorithms and the data structures for functional programming). I think this is a good and produces useful things that peculate into other programming languages. The other points I feel are answered with in the points I answered and so will not answer, but reiterate I am not defending the elite status of lisp or lisp dialects I think the article was some what juvenile.