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Comment by peterashford | Hacker News Reader

Other posters have given serious answers. I would add my own: its an excuse for a language superiority complex. It assumes that everyone using "less powerful" languages do so because they just don't understand "more powerful" languages while excluding the idea that they might just find that language X is the right fit for their domain. (e.g.: asm is probably more "powerful" than python, but I'd rather do string manipulation in the latter)

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eh, it seems you got it backwards, pg's main point seem to me to be productiveness, he even talks about python being one of the best(lispier) of the mainstream languages, so in that context python would be more powerful than asm and not the other way around.

as in blub ~= verbose and boilerplatey

I think it can't be reduced to that, I think a more important aspect is expressiveness, which isn't exactly terseness, I think some historical memory is pertinent here as even classic "blub" languages such as java have adopted plenty of functional characteristics since then, so the options available were very different.

true, but I also think that blub is not really about smug or being condescending hence my comment above; expressiveness / hackability / self tooling

The problem with 'expressiveness' is that beyond a certain point, the cognitive load imposed by reading the code exceeds any benefit from the increased density and abstraction. You basically have to decompress the code in your head in order to comprehend it in any useful way.

Only if it's written so badly that it leaks, or you need to modify that particular abstraction. In all other cases, you should be able to read the code easily and understand what it expresses without the need for exploring underlying layers of abstraction.

I agree it's hard to write good abstractions, but the problem isn't really in Lisp per se - it's just that being able to express any abstraction you want cleanly makes you realize that coming up with correct abstractions is very hard mental work. You may refrain from doing it, but Lisp at least gives you the option.

Substitute "productivity" there for power and I think the point still stands. PG sees a hierarchy of languages based on some inherent goodness of the language - and surprise, surprise, his favourite language, Lisp, is on top. I think that's BS. How good a language is depends more on the problem than some inherent quality of the language. I think it's pretty hard to get past the fact that a term like "Blub" clearly indicates that PG feels that he's a superior, higher class programmer than those who use "Blub" languages.

You say it depends on the problem you're solving, but if you turn around and look at the problems people are solving, you could easily see them falling largely into a few common classes.

Like, we all will admit that no natural language is inherently better than any other, but yet we still recommend that programmers learn English -- the quality of the language may not be inherent to the language, but it could be inherent to the context in which the language exists.

It's not what PG precisely said that matters, it's the intent and notion behind it, which is misguided (and different people could use it to attribute it to asm or idris or whatever -- the notion of the hierarchy of languages that is concrete and task-independent).

> asm is probably more "powerful" than python, but I'd rather do string manipulation in the latter

I don't think that's quite what PG meant by power. That being said, I do not think I would be able to close the distance between our understandings, sadly.

>That being said, I do not think I would be able to close the distance between our understandings, sadly.

Or you could just say what you think PG meant, e.g. "by more powerful he means a language more easily manipulated and expressive".

How about that instead of the current comment ending that can be understood as "I've given up hope that you'll ever understand what I mean".

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