5 ms·

I hate to be "that guy", but I think you all might be misunderstanding the meaning of "blub". Remember, "Blub" comes from the Blub Paradox (http://paulgraham.c

by twir 17y ago

I hate to be "that guy", but I think you all might be misunderstanding the meaning of "blub". Remember, "Blub" comes from the Blub Paradox (http://paulgraham.com/avg.html http://paulgraham.com/avg.html) in which one paradoxically believes that his or her language of choice (let's call it Blub) is the overall best language and that others are no good, usually due to missing some particular feature, or that they are too complicated. An ironic example is that Paul Graham, who I believe is the creator of said paradox, asks rhetorically "If LISP is so great, why doesn't everybody use it?" and later, "I will say that LISP is at the top of the power spectrum." In effect, he's guilty of falling into his own paradox by assuming his language is at the top of the power spectrum, which is no different from assuming some other hypothetical language (that may have more capability than LISP) is too complicated.

10ren 17y ago
I'm aware of where it comes from. The idea is that people who don't use lisp are so profoundly ignorant, that they don't even know they are ignorant. That's an offensive idea to start with. The second thing is that the word used to denote that concept, blub, is itself offensive, and it's used in an offensive school-yard way ("blub programmer"). It's surprising to see people promoting arc with this approach. But reading your post closely, you're saying that blub strictly only refers to people who believe their language is the best and others are no good. In the avg.html article, it also says "How can you get anything done in Blub? It doesn't even have y." and talks about people looking down on less powerful languages. Therefore, a person programming in Java (or assembly or whatever) isn't a blub programmer unless he believes that language is the best, that others are no good, and he looks down on less powerful languages (maybe a more accurate word for this attitude is "snob".) My experience is that most programmers don't do that.
philwelch 17y ago
Well that depends on Paul Graham's knowledge of other languages. If Paul Graham knows Lisp and only Lisp, perhaps he's falling into the Blub paradox when it comes to Prolog. But if Paul Graham knows Lisp, C, Smalltalk, and Cobol, and has all the necessary language concepts from those to understand Ruby and Perl even if he hasn't used Ruby and Perl extensively, then he's on decent grounds to claim that Lisp is more powerful than those languages. The blub paradox comes from someone who only knows Pascal doesn't understand why you'd want classes or functional programming. (We're assuming he only knows classical Pascal, not Delphi.) It accounts for the resistance of C hackers to object oriented languages (as illustrated, rather passive-aggressively, in such books as Object Oriented Programming in ANSI C), the resistance of Java coders to first class functions (we have a design pattern for that! it's called "functor"!) and so forth. It doesn't apply to someone who knows Haskell criticizing Java for OO fetishism, or a Java programmer scoffing at Pascal for not having classes. And the only place where I've ever read pg as critical of another language's abstractions is his remarks on Prolog. Now, that might be because he's fallen into the blub paradox, or maybe he has a good enough understanding of Prolog to authoritatively say it's only useful for 2% of problems and gets in your way the rest of the time. I can't read minds.
- deleted 17y ago
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- silentbicycle 17y ago
  Perhaps Prolog isn't very relevant to the sort of problems Paul Graham works on? Much of Peter Norvig's _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming_ is about Prolog (and logic programming in general); he ultimately implements a Prolog engine in Common Lisp, because it's a more appropriate tool for the sort of problems he's dissecting. I only know the basics of Prolog from PAIP and CTM (one of many things I hope to get into deeper over the summer...), but it seems like it would be incredibly useful, albeit within a very specific niche. I wouldn't try to write an OS in make, but that doesn't mean it isn't handy sometimes.
  - philwelch 17y ago
    Undoubtedly there's a category of "languages" that, despite their power, are only really useful for a specific application (make, yacc, SQL, PostScript) distinct from more general purpose languages. Perl used to be in the camp of specialized languages (need to munge some text?) but now it's squarely a general purpose language. I've always seen Prolog billed as a general purpose language. If it's intended as a special purpose language, then it doesn't even make sense to criticize it compared to Lisp or C.
- twir 17y ago
  Indeed. Yet I was also trying to illustrate (albeit unsuccessfully) how the language snobbery is basically the same thing--a failing to recognize a language for what it's worth. As you point out, languages often have specialties and are better suited than more powerful languages for certain tasks.

by twir 17y ago

10ren 17y ago

I'm aware of where it comes from. The idea is that people who don't use lisp are so profoundly ignorant, that they don't even know they are ignorant. That's an offensive idea to start with. The second thing is that the word used to denote that concept, blub, is itself offensive, and it's used in an offensive school-yard way ("blub programmer"). It's surprising to see people promoting arc with this approach. But reading your post closely, you're saying that blub strictly only refers to people who believe their language is the best and others are no good. In the avg.html article, it also says "How can you get anything done in Blub? It doesn't even have y." and talks about people looking down on less powerful languages. Therefore, a person programming in Java (or assembly or whatever) isn't a blub programmer unless he believes that language is the best, that others are no good, and he looks down on less powerful languages (maybe a more accurate word for this attitude is "snob".) My experience is that most programmers don't do that.

philwelch 17y ago

Well that depends on Paul Graham's knowledge of other languages. If Paul Graham knows Lisp and only Lisp, perhaps he's falling into the Blub paradox when it comes to Prolog. But if Paul Graham knows Lisp, C, Smalltalk, and Cobol, and has all the necessary language concepts from those to understand Ruby and Perl even if he hasn't used Ruby and Perl extensively, then he's on decent grounds to claim that Lisp is more powerful than those languages. The blub paradox comes from someone who only knows Pascal doesn't understand why you'd want classes or functional programming. (We're assuming he only knows classical Pascal, not Delphi.) It accounts for the resistance of C hackers to object oriented languages (as illustrated, rather passive-aggressively, in such books as Object Oriented Programming in ANSI C), the resistance of Java coders to first class functions (we have a design pattern for that! it's called "functor"!) and so forth. It doesn't apply to someone who knows Haskell criticizing Java for OO fetishism, or a Java programmer scoffing at Pascal for not having classes. And the only place where I've ever read pg as critical of another language's abstractions is his remarks on Prolog. Now, that might be because he's fallen into the blub paradox, or maybe he has a good enough understanding of Prolog to authoritatively say it's only useful for 2% of problems and gets in your way the rest of the time. I can't read minds.

deleted 17y ago
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silentbicycle 17y ago
Perhaps Prolog isn't very relevant to the sort of problems Paul Graham works on? Much of Peter Norvig's _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming_ is about Prolog (and logic programming in general); he ultimately implements a Prolog engine in Common Lisp, because it's a more appropriate tool for the sort of problems he's dissecting. I only know the basics of Prolog from PAIP and CTM (one of many things I hope to get into deeper over the summer...), but it seems like it would be incredibly useful, albeit within a very specific niche. I wouldn't try to write an OS in make, but that doesn't mean it isn't handy sometimes.
- philwelch 17y ago
  Undoubtedly there's a category of "languages" that, despite their power, are only really useful for a specific application (make, yacc, SQL, PostScript) distinct from more general purpose languages. Perl used to be in the camp of specialized languages (need to munge some text?) but now it's squarely a general purpose language. I've always seen Prolog billed as a general purpose language. If it's intended as a special purpose language, then it doesn't even make sense to criticize it compared to Lisp or C.
twir 17y ago
Indeed. Yet I was also trying to illustrate (albeit unsuccessfully) how the language snobbery is basically the same thing--a failing to recognize a language for what it's worth. As you point out, languages often have specialties and are better suited than more powerful languages for certain tasks.