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Comment by babul | Hacker News Reader

They have thier uses but will not be readily adopted as Python as it is too hard for most people to change thier thinking to functional programming.

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That's even better for the argument being made, which is that Python used to be a good weeder language (since the only people who knew it tended to be real hackers) but it no longer is, because more people have learned it just to do their jobs. If functional languages are really too difficult to ever get widespread adoption (which I doubt), that makes it even more likely that functional languages are and will continue to be good languages to use if you want to attract only smart people.

Edit: your other comments in this thread also don't seem to be addressing the article. The article is running with the idea that more obscure languages are better - because widespread adoption means that poorer programmers will learn it in order to get jobs.

http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Right. That's the exact same essay that the linked article was talking about...is there something you wanted to say about it?

I made sloppy link insert as a comment in haste, no real purpose or reason. I must have come into the discussion through user comment history from another article and thought the topic was on that other article. In essence I was replying just to the commenter and not the overall posted article.

just because something is difficult to learn does not make it a goog weeder. Python/Perl/etc. were not thatdifficult to learn and back in late 90s were goog indicators as people who used them were focused on getting things done easily and efficiently as possible.

This, and the the fact that generally they were not taught at college/undergrad level, menat people who had learnt them were self-developers and/or early adopters etc. who had a "real" interest/passion and which then helped to differentiate them from the general masses.

Just because you know a functional language does not neccessarily make you any more/less smart. I know plenty of people who are brilliant at things like ML (they have maths backgrounds) but not so great at bigger picture thinking and putting it all together. the really smart ones are people who can do that.

Just imho how I see things.

Sorry if I was off topic in posts, maybe I was missing points as reposonding to many things at once.

Could be interesting to investigate what new (or old) approach to programming might act as a filter if functional programming ever goes mainstream.

It's not that it's hard, it's just that it violates the readability tenet of python. You can see online GVR himself scolding people for producing semi-functional code because it turns out to be a mess.

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