Comment by martinced | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martinced | Hacker News Reader

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Why is it that nearly everytime some coding blog writes about something interesting you've got lots and lots of people criticizing the entry and saying, basically, that "the old way of doing thing is just fine, it's just you that are too stupid to understand it".

I'm sorry but that's not how it works. I've been coding for 20 years or so and I'm always open to new things. The first time I heard about using immutable objects in Java nearly everybody was laughing at the idea, making fun of it. Nowadays it's the contrary that is true. Same thing for using composition instead of concrete inheritance: everybody was there, ten years ago, saying that there was no problem with Java's concrete (implementation) inheritance. Or checked exceptions. Etc.

It's nearly always the same thing: a concept that is not mainstream but that looks very promising is explained in great details and yet people come here, bragging: "You're too stupid to understand ${common way of doing things}, there's no need for ${less commonly used technology}".

This really saddens me.

This is exactly what pg calls "Blub programmer" syndrome:

Programs that write programs? When would you ever want to do that? Not very often, if you think in Cobol. All the time, if you think in Lisp. It would be convenient here if I could give an example of a powerful macro, and say there! how about that? But if I did, it would just look like gibberish to someone who didn't know Lisp; there isn't room here to explain everything you'd need to know to understand what it meant.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Hopefully though, people who are open to new ways to do things can achieve harder things.

Thank you. It's really quite depressing to visit Hacker News and see it filled with people being unopen to intelligent ideas to make things better.

This is what I personally call 'Bandwagon Threshold Theory'.

People resist the new ideas until a critical mass of people start admiring it.

Only then they'll 'jump on the bandwagon' and tell everyone all about how cool this new idea is.

I've been coding for 20 years too and I'm also open to new things. But no one can be proficient in everything anymore so there is a cost to learning something new: we have to forget something we previously spent time to become familiar with.

Don't be sad, it's clearly a natural reaction that has some utility. I agree that there's a better way to phrase it, usually something like "is it really that much better than what we have now?"

"we have to forget something we previously spent time to become familiar with."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dbDJzDV1CM

Well, there are many existing and more complete solutions to "callback hell", many JS devs worth their salt already use futures/promises/defers in one way or another. The author seems to ignore existing solutions completely.

Whether this project will even be finished -- or much less, be better than other solutions -- is yet to be seen. Any features that make Elm's callback solution stand out from the crowd are not being advertised.

i've been following elm with interest for a while now, and the author's general blogging style is "here are some reasons you'll be happy using elm" rather than "here is why elm is better than all the other altjs languages out there". elm doesn't need to stand out, it just needs to be a pleasant, productive way to do things.

Controversy and strong negative opinions in HN also correlate with cheap attention grabbing titles. If you're going to use an ages old programming catchphrase to get pageviews, you better have something really substantial to say.

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