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Comment by eternityforest | Hacker News Reader

What are these iternant code students trying to achieve with all this? Performance? Productivity? Lower defects?

Safety critical code seems to still be usually in C/C++, for reasons having nothing to do with the language being safe. Why are these people not studying Erlang, MISRA C, Rust, some kind of formal proof solver language, or OpenCL?

What do people aspire to one day work on that would make the Haskell or LISP more appealing than a more locked down, static checking, kind of language?

Programming culture is more confusing than the code itself!

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At risk of sounding like Peter Thiel I think a lot of this thinking is driven my mimesis rather than thinking. That is, there is a lot of talk about how

   functional >> OO

and "OO sux" and all that. I think most of these people hadn't worked in the industry enough to have a clear picture of what better productivity and lower defects would look like but instead they were looking for a movement to join.

Mastery, perhaps. They see some sort of role model and figure the tools they use are a roadmap to becoming a distinguished engineer themselves. If only it was that easy.

It is interesting how functional programming has to consider data organization completely differently, but sometimes it is just that, a tool or methodology, not a philosophy to subscribe to. Ideally, the good (or future good) engineers realize this and try to understand the less talked about soft skills needed to succeed.

I guess that's probably a lot of why I don't get it, I never had any programmer role models. I looked up to Adam and Jamie, and I never saw them doing serious code.

Who are Adam and Jamie? Mythbusters?

Yep! For a while when I was really little I thought maybe I wanted to make video games, but... that's really hard.

The stuff I was really excited about was mostly "tech in the physical world" related.

Although with the AI boom, and how I'm too clumsy for jobs involving driving... I might be making a lot more if I'd at least tried to focus on the pure programming stuff instead of embedded, even though I never had any real talent for advanced algorithms...

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