Comment by CodeMage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CodeMage | Hacker News Reader

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Fascinating. This post illustrates precisely what -- in my opinion -- is the attitude that makes someone a Blub programmer. That's what Paul Graham was originally talking about: people who learn and develop their skills as programmers up to a certain point and then say "That's enough, I'm comfortable."

Don't get me wrong, you can get to be a damn good Blub programmer. You can also work at an international company, headquartered in US, without being skilled enough at English to appreciate Shakespeare's work; or, for that matter, loathe it, since you need the same level of proficiency.

I do believe that you'll never get to enjoy English to the fullest, if you don't explore its poetic reaches. In words of Wilhelm von Humboldt:

The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.

I believe that the same applies to programming languages. Yes, you can be really good with just Java. But just by learning C# on the side, you can gain valuable insights without stepping too far from your comfort zone. Learning Lisp, Self, Python and Factor, to name a few, will give you whole new worldviews, make you think differently. You don't really need that stuff to make software (or money). But it can make you a hell of a lot better at it and, more importantly, it can make you enjoy it more.

The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.

WOW! I haven't heard that quote before. It quite aptly sums up the situation.

Most of the devs I encounter recently are at least curious about different families of language

- ruby or python (GTD lang's)

- java, C and derivatives

- concurrent/FP: ocaml, clojure, scala, haskell, clean, erlang, F#

- lisp/scheme, dylan

- smalltalk, factor, Ioke, forth,

Fortunately, you can spend all weekend reading about languages:

- hacker news; reddit; infoq.com; artima.com; theServerside.com and .net; Lambda the Ultimate

> smalltalk, factor, Ioke, forth,

This is an unexpected grouping; the design philosophies of Factor and Forth seem quite different from those of Smalltalk, which in turn I think is only one of the points of inspiration for Ioke. Is there some deeper similarity that you're pointing out here?

Not to mention how close are Smalltalk and Ruby.

I think OP's point is that enjoying the simple prose of programming, reveling in what you can accomplish with simple tools and techniques, is another equally valid route to enjoyment.

It's hard for me to disentangle pg's "blub" epithet from the fact that he's an investor who benefits from having a technical audience overly concerned with artistic merit and underly concerned with economic benefit.

I think OP's point is that enjoying the simple prose of programming, reveling in what you can accomplish with simple tools and techniques, is another equally valid route to enjoyment.

If that was true, the OP would have shown better understanding of the difference between "poetry" and "prose". Plinkplonk posted a pretty good analysis of false dichotomies and misinterpretations present in the OP's essay, so I won't repeat all that.

There is one point, however, that I would especially highlight here. The OP first claimed that when he has to look at the code, "the more obvious the code the better". Yet he claims further down that "the vast majority of the world’s programmers, want an 'easy' language, not a highly expressive, poetic language". That's where the OP's lack of understanding of what he calls "poetic languages" is made evident. The benefit of a highly expressive language is that you can make your code more obvious.

As it is, the essay basically reads as "Yes, we Blub programmers like Blub precisely because it's in our comfort zone and that's good enough and we don't care for the rest."

It's hard for me to disentangle pg's "blub" epithet from the fact that he's an investor who benefits from having a technical audience overly concerned with artistic merit and underly concerned with economic benefit.

I confess that I don't understand your logic. How does Paul Graham "benefit" from "having a technical audience overly concerned with artistic merit and underly concerned with economic benefit"? I would expect the opposite, that an investor would benefit from having an audience that always keeps both its eyes on the economic bottom line. I would give your statement a benefit of a doubt if he was a CEO of a company that markets some fancy, new Lisp platform as "The Next Big Thing".

> The benefit of a highly expressive language is that you can make your code more obvious.

I completely agree with your point about the expressiveness of poetry. Yes, there is some high initial investment in understanding poetry (in spoken language or programming language). And in return, you get a higher level of expressiveness. People look at the high level of investment, and say that the poetry isn't worth it, because they mistakenly think that it will require that level of investment every time. But like any language construct, once you really learn it, it becomes natural to you and doesn't require that high investment each time.

I wrote a Turing machine generator in arc once. To me, that was the prime example of the power and pitfalls of poetic language. At the time, I was practicing lisp like languages a lot, so it just flowed out off me. It was short and very powerful, and I could read through the dozen or so lines and see the equivalent logic expanding in my head. It would've taken many more lines of C++ or Python to get that logic working. Now that I'm out of practice, going back and reading it makes the whole thing seem completely inscrutable. That doesn't mean the language is any less easy or less expressive, it means I'm less good at seeing it.

I am not discounting the application of "poetic" solutions, certainly there are cases where this is a justified approach. E.g. I think this is particularly relevent in regards to parallelization.

There's a time for poetry and a time for prose: I'm merely saying that neither side should be throwing epithets.

pg extracts shareholder value by managing the artistic/economic gap. I am not being critical: this is a perfectly valid thing to do with one's time, I'd take his job in a heartbeat =o)

However, I'd wager that if you added up salaries forgone by ycombinator participants and compared them against aggregate payout it would paint a fairly bleak economic picture.

I'd wager that if you added up salaries forgone by ycombinator participants and compared them against aggregate payout it would paint a fairly bleak economic picture.

I'd take that wager at a 100:1 payout in a heartbeat!

My guess is that it takes 5-7 years for payouts to start happening from startups, so allowing for that much time, I have no doubt that the total payout will be much greater than would be from regular salaries. All you need are a few to hit it out of the park, and you've covered everyone.

Of course, we're talking about aggregates here; I could certainly imagine that for some fraction of the participants, it might be a net lose monetarily.

http://sam.bluwiki.com/blog/2007/04/y-combinators-portfolio....

Their most successful sale is still Reddit, yes? Assuming moderate dilution, I imagine payout per founder in the $1mm-$2mm range. Assuming the average ycombinator is capable of securing a 6-figure job, their greatest success only accounts for 2 years living wages of 10 failures.

Forget the multi-million dollar company valuations: almost everyone on this board would have a multi-million dollar valuation if they were willing (or legally able) to sell ownership over all their future cash flows.

In the interest of being sporting amidst all the downvotes - happy to make this wager up to $1k to anyone who P.M.'s me - we can draw up reasonable terms.

Please note I have the greatest respect for entrepreneurs and what they do, I'm just making the point that what they do is not economically motivated in general. I'm also not making a comment on whether ycombinator itself does well - their investments are much smaller than forgone wages.

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