Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedwards1211 | Hacker News Reader

"it embodies a radical and elegant attack on the entire enterprise of writing software"

An "attack"? Jeez

It's academic language. It's common to read in a paper that a piece of research is an "attack" on a particular problem. This language could probably stand to be changed for a more generalist audience.

Academics attack problems, not areas of endeavor.

Anyway, the language shows how disconnected the authors are from the community they are trying to join. It may be for the best to wear that on their sleeve instead of misleading people.

The sponsors are IOHK, Tweag, and Well Typed, with SPJ giving an opening talk. Kevin Hammond and Phil Wadler work at IOHK. That basically is Haskell.

The authors are a mixture of academics and industry professionals and they are already part of the community. The statement could do with a bit of copy editing.

It's not academic language, it's tech evangelist language. If you've been in the tech industry you hear it all the time as people try to sell their software/platform/stack/etc to you. Nothing wrong with that. People passionate about their tech should be colorful with their language.

Perhaps, but it's an original quotation from Simon Peyton Jones and he's typically thought of more as an academic than a tech evangelist.

If you watch an SPJ conference talk, this sort of language is par for the course. He's very energetic and occasionally hyperbolic, often using very engaging rhetoric to make his talks fun and catchy. I can 100% imagine him saying the quoted line out loud and it sounds just fine, but written in text without his emphasis makes it seem much more like an evangelist than he really is.

It needs to be a video of SPJ to do it justice

Reply on news.ycombinator.com