Arguing against continuing to have these pointless discussions on HN every 57.3 days.
Of course I care. It's what I do. I just don't see a point in people getting lost in language, editor, IDE --whatever-- discussions. They just don't matter. One can write absolutely-brilliant or absolutely-shit code using any tool one might care to name.
Yeah. Let's get essential. Let's not talk about non-essential stuff like programming languages, IDEs, tools. The only thing that really matters is that the thing you are using can make money. And lots of them.
No. Let people discuss what interests them. Discussions lead to better tools and new perspectives. Stop this "I transcend these trivial discussions and I am such a pragmatic and bricolage type of person."
The problem is that a lot of these discussions turn in to pissing matches that are not constructive at all. In the meantime, if you are a working programmer none of this is relevant to you. If you are working on iOS you are, more than likely, not going to be writing native apps in Python or Lisp no matter how wonderful they might be.
The academic discussions are most definitely necessary. When they take place in places like HN I am not sure that they surface in the best possible light. There are no real conclusions. There are no "calls to action". No test cases are produced and few, if any, real-world results can be pointed to. I seriously doubt that such discussions on HN would start a massive movement to introduce a new paradigm that sweeps a significant portion of the software development universe. I think those things happen far more organically and, by the time they bubble-up to places like HN a significant body of work is already in place.
I'll use as an example something like Meteor. I don't know that full history. I did learn about it on HN --which is solid indication that there's value in HN as provider of programmer-relevant news. However, I don't think that Meteor had it's genesis out of a discussion on HN. And a significant body of work was already in place by the time it made it into HN. And, as far as I know, Meteor wasn't created out of long academic discussions on HN or otherwise. It probably was an idea that coalesced into a project when the founders got together and bounded it around (best guess).
I have seen (and got sucked into) many pointless discussions on HN about these kinds of topics. Discussions about such topics as "to vim or not to vim" can get, to be kind, "interesting", when, in reality, they are pointless. You use the tools that let you get to a shippable product at the time you have a project on your desk and move on. In that context there is no "best". That was my point in mentioning making money with assembler. Did I want to write complex code in assembler? No. Was it necessary due to performance? Nope. Was it a pain? Absolutely. Did it work? Yup. I had lemons and I made lemon-juice. Optimize later.
Oh I worked with the guys he's talking about. They never start with data, they never even consider talking about data. Their world is the world of categories and taxonomies. They treat everything as an organism and favor class diagrams to data flow charts.
Rob Pike is insanely good at what he does. But along the way he maintained insane ignorance about everything he doesn't do. Unfortunately, he forgets to confine his opinions to the important areas where he is knowledgeable, and has grown defensive about the world straying away from his domain. Hence the nonsensical rants against OO and type theory that put incoherent words in the mouths of his straw men.
Contrast to someone like Simon Thompson, toiling for decades on a marginalized language (Haskell) for decades, yet never wasting time insulting people who ignore his work. In fact, he praises his team for avoiding the distrsctions and hassles of attaining popularity before his work is perfected
