Comment by CraneWorm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CraneWorm | Hacker News Reader

> Different languages have different failure modes. With Perl, the project might fail because you designed and implemented a pile of shit, but there is a clever workaround for any problem, so you might be able to keep it going long enough to hand it off to someone else, and then when it fails it will be their fault, not yours. With Haskell someone probably should have been fired in the first month for choosing to do it in Haskell.

So much unnecessary hate and stereotyping. And I bet they were thinking they're tongue-in-cheek-but-still-sounding-clever.

Also, interesting choice of programming languages, neither Python, PHP nor C got any flack, Javascript was spared but Java, Perl and Haskell are evil and using them makes you a "mediocre drone that cares only about cranking the lever and spouting code" (I'm paraphrasing the article here).

Choose your technology, learn your tools...

> I enjoyed programming in Java, and being relieved of the responsibility for producing a quality product.

Although, with that mindset, maybe forego programming altogether.

The author makes it really hard to judge his tone, but I don't think you're reading it right. For example, if you peruse his other articles, it's clear he really likes Haskell (he certainly doesn't consider it evil).

I can't say I understand every one of his assertions, and trying to be funny/sarcastic makes it hard to truly understand the point of his article, which I think is: Java lacks focus and is a verbose language, and therefore you should probably pick something else to solve interview challenges. I tend to agree.

I thought he summed up the tone pretty well earlier in the article:

> Java is neither a good nor a bad language. It is a mediocre language, and there is no struggle.

To be more explicit - I think the point he is trying to make is that Java is not very powerful (in sense of expression), which has benefits (making it hard to fuck up badly) but at the cost of pushing the programmer towards mediocre, verbose and inefficient solutions (again due to lack of expressiveness, trying to come up with elegant and efficient solutions is too tiresome).

Perhaps it's the difference between a scalpel and a blunt club. You're not going to cut off your own fingers with the club, but you're not going to be able to perform brain surgery or fix someone's heart either. Not the best analogy because technically Java and any other language is turing complete, but they are not equal in how easy it is to coerce the machine into performing a particular computation, and expressing that humanly.

How do you measure "mediocre"? And what do you mean by inefficient? In any language you can code 99% of the things needed by 99% of most of the systems. Most of the "I love/hate this language" is usually subjective perception or strong preference for certain programming paradigms: people loving/hating OOP, people love/hating verbosity and so forth.

You don't, it's all opinion, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

We can at least all agree there is difference in the efficiency of writing a program in binary opcodes for a specific architecture vs writing one in C... although quantifying it is impossible, and that's just one quality.

Leaving the low level languages aside, most of the top level one can achieve the same things with similar costs. It's still up to the individual/team skill how those apps/systems end up to be built. If some project fails, is rarely "picking the wrong language" reason...

The author is MJD. He is, among other things, the author of one of the best functional programming books[1].

> I was a professional Java programmer for three years (in a different organization), and I have meant for some time to write up my thoughts about it. I am often very bitter and sarcastic, and I willingly admit that I am relentlessly negative and disagreeable, so it can be hard to tell when I am in earnest about liking something. I once tried to write a complimentary article about Blosxom, which has generated my blog since 2006, and I completely failed; people thought I was being critical, and I had to write a followup article to clarify, and people still thought I was dissing Blosxom. Because this article about Java might be confused with sarcastic criticism, I must state clearly that everything in this article about Java is in earnest, and should be taken at face value. Including:

> I really like Java

> ...

> So yes, I enjoyed programming in Java, and being relieved of the responsibility for producing a quality product. It was pleasant to not have to worry about whether I was doing a good job, or whether I might be writing something hard to understand or to maintain. The code was ridiculously verbose, of course, but that was not my fault. It was all out of my hands.

[1]: https://hop.perl.plover.com/

> mediocre drone that cares only about cranking the lever and spouting code

He says that about Java alone. He very clearly says it doesn't apply to Perl or Haskell.

Also, there is no judgement on the coder, he states that anybody, good or bad, caring or uncaring creates mediocre code on it.

And, well, it fits my experience.

his description of perl is even less charitable

Accusing Mark Dominus of throwing shade on Perl seems misguided.

I think you misunderstood his post...

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