Comment by NyxWulf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NyxWulf | Hacker News Reader

Interesting concept, but the flaw at the heart is the presupposition that lack of progress right now means we are at the ultimate limit of what can be accomplished. Imagine if cavemen learning to paint on walls said, well we haven't improved in a few millennia, so this is probably the most complex thing that can be represented by drawings. Or what about math stopping with Euclid? It was thousands of years later that progress happened.

Technology comes in fits and starts. A lot of new things happened in the 50s and 60s, we are still trying to figure out ways to use and apply them. Just because someone thought about and prototyped something then doesn't mean it's not new when that feature goes mainstream (e.g. garbage collection in Java, channels for concurrency in Go, etc).

For a long time we couldn't break the sound barrier, which is a limit, but not the speed of light limit. Because progress is stalled now doesn't mean there will never be progress in the future.

The author addresses this in the post. First by comparing major technological advances to earthquakes: "they occur at unpredictable intervals, with little prior warning before their emergence." At the end of the post he says that he doesn't think we've reached an ultimate limit and that the language design space needs to be explored more fully.

Which would mean even he doesn't agree with his ridiculous main point. But I think you're being too generous.

I think it's more of a thought experiment; just an interesting idea to entertain even if we haven't reached the limit. The more immediately applicable point is that of a cognitive limit moreso than the suggestion of a technological limit.

I think the author did address this but you raise an interesting analogy. I remember Carl Sagan made a point in Cosmos that the natural sciences lost millenia of progress thanks to the dominance of Platonic thought and mysticism over empiricle research and observation. I do not think it will take millenia to see it, but perhaps in a few decades we will see the present circumstances of program language application in a similar light.

>" Imagine if cavemen learning to paint on walls said, well we haven't improved in a few millennia, so this is probably the most complex thing that can be represented by drawings."

The analogy between painting and programming languages has some precedent around the HN community. But the idea that contemporary painted images are more advanced than those on the walls of Lascaux is suspect because it is premised upon our acceptance of a belief that the ancient paintings were not well suited to their purpose.

It is more likely that the opposite is the case. Today, most paintings carry little significant meaning to their author's larger community. The odds that Salvador Dali's butcher was impacted by the armlessness of Venus de Milo are pretty low - never mind the $86 clown on steel collage Mission Thrift Store.

Art and programming languages have evolved. But that evolution is Darwinian not teleological. High-level languages are better adapted to the humans who write them but not the machines which run them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com