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The anti-intellectuals have the general attitude that language doesn't matter. This attitude should not be discounted. You'll find fewer proponents of strong t

The anti-intellectuals have the general attitude that language doesn't matter. This attitude should not be discounted. You'll find fewer proponents of strong type systems than me. I recently started working with a client who wanted to build a Haskell system in order to do some complex financial modelling. I told them to forget Haskell and build a Python/Django app that will handle 90% of their customers. The only significant bug was comparing a backward discounted quantity to a forward discounted quantity. Haskell wouldn't solve that. The development effort saved due to not rewriting built-in django apps vastly outweighed any productivity benefit we'd have gotten from using Haskell.

collyw 12y ago
A friend started a company a couple of years back. He was not a programmer, but worked in a lab, so knew the bioinformaticians favored Python. He insisted that the app was built in Python. I was thinking that the language didn't really matter. Anyway, a couple of years later he got a grant to continue with the project. It was junior level wages. And he couldn't get a Python programmer to work for that (he asked me) amongst others. PHP would have probably opened up more options in that respect, even though it is considered a poorer choice of language.
michaelochurch 12y ago
I told them to forget Haskell and build a Python/Django app that will handle 90% of their customers. That's not anti-intellectualism. It's practicality. The "right tool for the job" isn't always the same language. Often it's Python, because the libraries are mature. Machine learning is one area where this is often true. Python itself doesn't seem like it should be a leading ML language, but it's far ahead of the competition in terms of library support (e.g. Numpy, Scipy, Pandas, et al).
dllthomas 12y ago
"The only significant bug was comparing a backward discounted quantity to a forward discounted quantity. Haskell wouldn't solve that." It could, depending on how you code. For that matter, so could C.

collyw 12y ago

A friend started a company a couple of years back. He was not a programmer, but worked in a lab, so knew the bioinformaticians favored Python. He insisted that the app was built in Python. I was thinking that the language didn't really matter. Anyway, a couple of years later he got a grant to continue with the project. It was junior level wages. And he couldn't get a Python programmer to work for that (he asked me) amongst others. PHP would have probably opened up more options in that respect, even though it is considered a poorer choice of language.

michaelochurch 12y ago

I told them to forget Haskell and build a Python/Django app that will handle 90% of their customers. That's not anti-intellectualism. It's practicality. The "right tool for the job" isn't always the same language. Often it's Python, because the libraries are mature. Machine learning is one area where this is often true. Python itself doesn't seem like it should be a leading ML language, but it's far ahead of the competition in terms of library support (e.g. Numpy, Scipy, Pandas, et al).

dllthomas 12y ago

"The only significant bug was comparing a backward discounted quantity to a forward discounted quantity. Haskell wouldn't solve that." It could, depending on how you code. For that matter, so could C.