3 ms·

Why is being pragmatic not intellectually reasonable?

• gknoy 11y ago
  One should not sneer or laugh at languages like Perl, COBOL, or similar, simply because there are others we like better, or are more popular. I used to be a HUGE Perl fan, and discounted Python for years. I figured that I already knew Java, and since Python and Perl were effectively similar, it was a waste of my time to study both. I now regret that. As formative as that was for my growth as a programmer, I've loved coding in Python more than almost any other language -- and I delayed that discovery by a decade because I wrote it off as "effectively the same as" Perl. Sure, it was pragmatic to focus on one language that I was learning and using. But the reasons I did so were flawed, IMO.
• mbrock 11y ago
  I'm not saying being "pragmatic" in this way is "bad" or "wrong," and since this is pretty much a total derail, I'll stop engaging in this thread. But, like, this is the actual thing you said that I was responding to: "the intellectually reasonable position for most people is to either ignore lisp or laugh at it" I said that such a position has nothing to do with "intellectual reasonableness" because it's barely an intellectual position at all. There is no propositional content; there is very little thought involved at all; it's a default "meh" position that is more accurately labelled "laziness."