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>As if it matters what language Carmack decides to use. I think if we look at the history of adoption of technology, a lot of it is driven by the top 1% endors

>As if it matters what language Carmack decides to use. I think if we look at the history of adoption of technology, a lot of it is driven by the top 1% endorsing it. I think its a pretty big deal when high profile people endorse a technology. Social capital is as real as financial capital. Carmack has lots of social capital and it can get results. His celebrity helped launch Oculus from a weirdo company playing with 90s relics to a Serious Threat to The Status Quo and I'm sure drew in big investors and eventually Facebook's purchase of it. >It's very illustrative to me of just how tribal we've become. This is how we've always been and will forever continue to be.

agentultra 12y ago
> I think if we look at the history of adoption of technology, a lot of it is driven by the top 1% endorsing it. I suppose this might be true but it's rather hard to quantify. I don't recall ever choosing to invest in and master a language from a celebrity endorsement. Some people might have -- I can't say. But it obviously does have merit because of the responses Carmack's tweet solicited so I don't disagree. I just found that the majority of responses were of this patronizing sort. If Carmack is amongst the top 1% of programmers, as you say, and is a minor celebrity as we both know then it seems disingenuous to immediately ask him, "Why not Haskell/Erlang/Clojure/Whatever-my-favorite-X-is?" Given his previous essays on functional programming and his move to adopt C++ I think it's safe to say he knows what he's doing and picked Racket for good reasons (even if it's as simple as, "I like it."). I made the tribe observation when it became apparent to me that perhaps they were jealous that Carmack didn't pick their tribe and bring his celebrity power along to them. I find that kind of sad and funny. I'm more curious as to what he's building than what language he's using to do it with. There are interesting things to talk about wrt the system he's building and the run-time he's building it on but that seems to go over the majority of peoples' heads. Even as a newcomer to the Racket ecosystem I think Carmack will have quite a lot to teach us as he develops this system: about Racket, the language VM, system architecture, his process, etc. So when I said, "As if it matters what language Carmack decides to use," what I was implying was that he probably has reasons and it's more interesting to know what those are. He could have continued writing it in C++, Haskell, anything... it's what he does choose, as opposed to the multitude of choices he didn't make, that is interesting here in my opinion.

agentultra 12y ago

> I think if we look at the history of adoption of technology, a lot of it is driven by the top 1% endorsing it. I suppose this might be true but it's rather hard to quantify. I don't recall ever choosing to invest in and master a language from a celebrity endorsement. Some people might have -- I can't say. But it obviously does have merit because of the responses Carmack's tweet solicited so I don't disagree. I just found that the majority of responses were of this patronizing sort. If Carmack is amongst the top 1% of programmers, as you say, and is a minor celebrity as we both know then it seems disingenuous to immediately ask him, "Why not Haskell/Erlang/Clojure/Whatever-my-favorite-X-is?" Given his previous essays on functional programming and his move to adopt C++ I think it's safe to say he knows what he's doing and picked Racket for good reasons (even if it's as simple as, "I like it."). I made the tribe observation when it became apparent to me that perhaps they were jealous that Carmack didn't pick their tribe and bring his celebrity power along to them. I find that kind of sad and funny. I'm more curious as to what he's building than what language he's using to do it with. There are interesting things to talk about wrt the system he's building and the run-time he's building it on but that seems to go over the majority of peoples' heads. Even as a newcomer to the Racket ecosystem I think Carmack will have quite a lot to teach us as he develops this system: about Racket, the language VM, system architecture, his process, etc. So when I said, "As if it matters what language Carmack decides to use," what I was implying was that he probably has reasons and it's more interesting to know what those are. He could have continued writing it in C++, Haskell, anything... it's what he does choose, as opposed to the multitude of choices he didn't make, that is interesting here in my opinion.