Hacker News Reader

Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

What percentage of programmers on Hacker News haven't?

Flaunting your ignorant anti-intellectualism isn't a good look.

You do know this is 2024, you have Internet access, and you can just look shit up or ask ChatGPT to learn new things, instead of cultivating ignorance and pointlessly criticising programmers trying to raise awareness, share their experiences, and educate themselves and other people.

In case you've been living under a rock and didn't realize it, JavaScript, the topic of this discussion, is essentially a dialect of Lisp, with garbage collection, first class functional closures, polymorphic JSON structures instead of s-expressions, a hell of a lot more like and inspired by Lisp and Scheme than C++, and LOTS of people know it.

View on HN

My point is that if someone says something is arcane, “it’s not, it’s just [something that you’ve potentially never heard of and almost definitely don’t understand even if you have heard of it]” doesn’t help your case. They could look it up, but the fact that they would have to do so proves the commenter’s point - relatively few programmers understand Lisp syntax, i.e. it is arcane.

If you’re trying to raise awareness of something, don’t act like the reader is stupid if they don’t already understand. Insisting that something is obvious, especially when it is not, means any reader who does not understand it will likely perceive the comment as snobby. As does including snide remarks such as “in case you’ve been living under a rock”.

> Flaunting your ignorant anti-intellectualism isn’t a good look.

Why do you assume that I personally don’t know what s-expressions are just because I agree that they’re arcane? Labelling someone as an ignorant anti-intellectual just because they disagree with something you said isn’t a good look either.

There's nothing "arcane" about WebAssembly Text format. The fact that you don't recognize it just means you don't know much about WebAssembly, which is fine, but you're whining, lashing out, and attacking people who are trying to explain it, and trying to police and derail discussions between other people who are more knowledgeable and interested in it, which makes you a rude anti-intellectual asshole.

Why don't you just go away and let other people have their interesting discussions without you, instead of bitterly complaining about things you purposefully know nothing about and refuse to learn? How does it hurt your delicate feelings to just shut up and not bitch and whine about discussions you're not interested in?

> you’re whining, lashing out, and attacking people who are trying to explain it

I think you’re assuming that all of the comments you’re talking about are written by the same person, when they’re not. I haven’t been attacking anyone, and I don’t think I’ve replied to anyone who’s tried to explain it.

> things you purposefully know nothing about and refuse to learn

Why do you still assume I don’t know what they are? I’ve already pointed out that my belief that s-expressions are arcane doesn’t mean I don’t know what they are.

As another illustration of my point, I just stumbled across this comment on another post:

> But maybe the whole "ease of use" budget is blown by using a Lisp in the first place.[0]

The fact is that Lisp syntax is understood by relatively few programmers, which meets the definition of arcane. You immediately flying off the handle when someone calmly points this out will not help your goal.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41965178

Exactly.

I, like most devs, know what Lisp is.

I, like most devs, just don't care.

I had a basic idea of what Lisp was before getting into it some 25 years ago. It soon became obvious that, no, I actually had no idea. It's not that what I thought had been wrong, but it had no content.

I knew Lisp the way I know that that guy walking down the street is my neighbor Bob. But since I've never had a conversation with Bob, I actually have no idea who he is.

When I see Korean writing in hangeul, I know it is Korean writing, but can't read a letter of it (nor speak a word of Korean).

These examples are like knowing what Lisp is.

The thing I had not expected was how the knowledge in the Lisp world and its perspectives are very informative about a whole lot of non-Lisp!

Most devs do know what Lisp'ish languages are because you just can't forget how weird a bunch of nested parenthesis look.

They just don't care enough to invest time in it because it is niche. And proponents tend to tirelessly spam about it from their ivory towers like it's flawless and everyone who didn't learn it is somehow inferior, somehow justifying personal attacks like yours. Classy as usual.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com