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Comment by thegeomaster | Hacker News Reader

Same here. Reading the article, I could not really relate to the experience of being a single-language developer for 10 years.

In my early days, I identified strongly with my chosen programming language, but people way more experienced than me taught me that a programming language is a tool, and that this approach is akin to saying "well, I don't know about those pliers, I am a hammerer."

My personal feeling from working across a wide range of programming languages is that it expands your horizons in a massive way (and hard to qualitatively describe), and I'm happy that I did this.

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Good analogy IMHO. Knowing whether a given language is a tool vs a toolbox is important.

The idiosyncrasies of Ruby, like Perl and JavaScript, lead to a certain kind of brain damage that make it difficult to build correct mental models of computing that can then generalize to other languages.

Although I disagree with your opinion (and who cares?), your comment reminded me of Winp Lo.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d696t3yALAY

This is profoundly racist.

Thank you, but I wasn’t going for racist.

What you may have missed, from the perspective of your vertically scaled horse, is that you compare learning certain models to a mental disability. It makes calling my comment racist similar to the whole pot/kettle thing.

However, I do appreciate reading about such opinions because it offers a peek into the elitism that surrounds programming languages.

Also, as a person from a non-traditional and non-privileged background, Im a little unsure about how to proceed. Shall we cut our losses and move on?

> Thank you LMAOOOOO I love the response, it's similar to "Thanks for noticing" B A S E D

how is that video racist? calling it racist appears to be much more racist

From my own personal experience I'd add Visual Basic to that list.

I never understood the hate. Beyond the stranger syntax, it's not terribly different from a language such as Pascal. It's an old imperative language without too much magic (beyond strange syntax sugar).

Terrible language, excellent tools.

Unless you’re writing instructions for a Turing machine the impedance mismatch between the real world and “computing” is always going to have idiosyncrasies. You don’t have to like a language to understand its design goals and trade offs. There are some very popular languages with constraints or designs that I feel are absurd, redundant, or counterproductive but I cannot think of a (mainstream) language where I haven’t seen someone much smarter than me do amazing things.

The language I consider the lamest, biggest impediment to learning computer science is used by some of the smartest people on the planet to build amazing things.

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