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Comment by WoodenChair | Hacker News Reader

A lot of hate in this presentation and a lot of generalizations. There are fantastic programming books. There are colleges doing a fantastic job teaching computer science. Making broad generalizations without solid statistics to at least back them up is usually not helpful.

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I'd agree... there is a lot of toxic gray-beardery here.

His argument for why he dislikes Go and Javascript is ostensibly "they are easy to grok"...

I don't think this presentation was made out of ill-will or spite, but I think this presentation leaves little room for the mediocre; and frankly if a field is devoid of mediocre performers, you end up with a handful of gray-beards in a code cloister.

This is where, I think, the programmer mentality and the human empathy understanding are out of balance, and lead to false truths about how humans ought to behave.

I sorta like his point about contributing upstream, but again, I think that he neglects the fact that that isn't a straight-forward process to someone new to a language. He brings up that "the Rust community is welcoming", but (a) that doesn't really apply to most communities and (b) especially when you're just starting and haven't had too much exposure, you probably haven't witnessed (or realise you have witnessed) a bug in the 4 (often mature) standard libraries you regularly use.

His dismissiveness of other languages is startling given the topic of this talk. The first step in learning is realizing that you don't know everything. To me the COBOL example is the most telling, he literally says there is nothing to learn from COBOL.

He’s a Haskell purist and (for lack of a better word) religious about it. He’s written what he thinks is the only good book in what he thinks is the only good language, so that tells you a lot about how he thinks. He views the world with a very rigorous set of particulars around what is “good” and what is “bad,” and because others don’t agree with those very specific particulars he considers everything else “bad” or “lazy.”

I like Chris, and he’s clearly a smart guy, but he’s not a person that pedagogical lessons should be learned from.

The book he wrote is a good example - and I enjoyed the book and recommend it. But it’s full of him using big words because at times he can, almost showing off, not because he should. I liked the book, and am glad he teaches the fundamentals of the lambda calculus, but it is very particular to Chris’s style, and that makes it the best programming book written in his eyes, despite not being the “best” programming book objectively.

> He’s also written what he thinks is the only good book in what he thinks is the only good language

I've no idea whether he thinks it's the only good Haskell book (do you have a reference for him claiming that?) but there is a sizeable segment of the Haskell community that considers it the best Haskell book. (I've never read it, personally.)

It pretty clearly, in my mind, is the best Haskell book. There are really only a couple attempts ever made at writing a Haskell book, so there’s not too terribly much competition.

There are many Haskell books. I bought and read a couple dozen for HPFFP, there are more than that but many aren't meant to be end-to-end introductions to Haskell.

It would be surprising if it were otherwise given its origins and age.

I remember BASIC was the subject of regular derision from experts. Nothing helped me get interested in programming with such a gentle learning curve as BASIC. Where it lacked in every other area, it excelled in making programming accessible with immediate results.

Visual Basic 6 got me hooked in grade school... nothing more rewarding than being able to write a GUI app and short little games in minutes :P

I'm the speaker. I got started with GW-BASIC and one of my mantras is "learning will never hurt you."

My beliefs are getting seriously distorted in this thread.

His argument for why he dislikes Go and Javascript is ostensibly "they are easy to grok"...

That's not a fair characterization. While it was not elegantly posed, the argument was in essence "these languages optimize for ease of adoption instead of power". It's objectively true that go and javascript deliberately aren't able to do a bunch of things that a language like haskell can. Different choices were made. That doesn't mean that go and javascript have no place in programming, since we definitely need languages that are easy to get started in to on-board new people. However, the question is whether it's right that those languages then end up being people's choice for the rest of their professional career. A programmer is more likely to grow when using tools that enable growth.

On the other hand, while I haven't written haskell, I have written a bunch of scala and C++, and both suffer from an excess of syntax. In both cases skilled practitioners learn to ignore some of the language features, to ensure their own sanity when maintaining those code bases later on. There is something to be said about having a language that doesn't allow wizardry when viewed through the lens of maintainability. From what I understand that is go's design.

This is par for the course with Chris. Super strong opinions about things with little room for those of anyone else.

I've been to a few meetups that Chris was present at and I have to say I was always somewhat surprised that he fancied himself a great teacher because I've found him to be impatient, condescending, and completely lacking empathy. I don't mean to say he's impossible to learn from (I am aware of people who site him as a reason they know some topic very well), just that in my experience teaching hundreds of people of varying skill levels he is not someone I would put in front of students.

Has this feedback reached Chris? How did he react?

He knows. And he reacts with rage. If not aimed at you, then at someone. Saw him take it out on Julie a number of times while they were working together.

I learned quite a bit from Chris, particularly his comments on HN and reddit, which he poured tons of time into over a couple year period. Very few people devote that level of time to answering questions in depth.

I've known Chris for a few years now. During this time I've asked him many questions, worked with him on projects (open source and otherwise) and I have never seen him act the way you describe it here. Moreover, I've also seen him talk to and teach people at conferences. He has always been very patient and helpful, encouraged people and nudged them in the right direction when they were stuck. Of all the teachers I've interacted with throughout my life, Chris definitely fits in the category I want to learn from. Like someone else has mentioned before, I encourage you to provide constructive feedback to him directly, he cares about teaching and does want to improve.

Agreed. The general vibe I got from his presentation was most people that call themselves professional programmers are living in a fantasy land. It reeks of the trope that "my programming language is better than yours."

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