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Comment by candybar | Hacker News Reader

I really don't like the anti-intellectual tone of the beginning.

"The problem with most programming languages is they're designed by language geeks, who tend to worry about things that I don't much care for. Safety, type systems, homoiconicity, and so forth."

can be rewritten as:

"The problem with most software is that they are designed by computer geeks, who tend to worry about things that I don't much care for. Information security, thread safety, modularity, hardware acceleration, system design, and so forth."

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I'm glad I'm not the only one. I couldn't make it past the first paragraph. He says he doesn't care for safety and type systems, and then says what he cares about is making it work and making it fast, both of which are significantly aided by safety and type systems.

All he's saying is he doesn't care about the features, just what they let him do with them. Type safety in and of itself isn't interesting to the author but he appreciates it's benefits.

If that's the case, the author would be well-served by rewriting the first paragraph to make that clear. The way it's currently written does not communicate that to me at all.

Safety/type systems may significantly aid making it work/fast, but the end result is more important to him than more abstract concepts.

Some people are really interested in making compilers, right? While others (such as me) just want to do cool things with them.

The language may have been grating, but as someone who also comes from more of a scientific computing background, I read this as "I want a language to be a tool that I can use to solve scientific and engineering problems with minimal conceptual overhead due to minding language features." I read it as saying "Finally, a language designed for someone like me," which I also find true personally.

"I want a language to be a tool that I can use to solve scientific and engineering problems with minimal conceptual overhead due to minding language features."

Among compiled languages, isn't that Fortran, especially since Fortran 90 on have multidimensional array operations, like Julia, Numpy, and Matlab.

It is of course, but there is a lot of convenience in using an interpreted language with a REPL and a decent standard library.

It should read the other way round - Julia, Numpy, especially Matlab have array operations like Fortran 90, since they are designed by people from that background.

The problem with Fortran is interoperabality with other libraries; if you leave scientific computing, you're basically out of luck. Writing a GUI is just not going to happen. It is really fast, but it is also not as easy for prototyping since it is also compiled like C. Finally, Fortran does have the kind of stigma coming from older versions like 77 - and it's still really easy to write REALLY bad and unmaintainable code with it if you're not minding the newer language features. Especially OOP (since Fortran 2003) feels a bit tacked on.

Exactly - I read it as an expression of a tool designed as a tool, rather than an elegant and intellectually fulfilling exploration of toolness.

The irony is the creators of julia paid attention to all of those computer science things in order to create the language he wanted to use.

His point is: while these things can be nice, no one cares about them other than language designer. They are only means to an end, which is user experience. Sure, some car buyers may know or care what alloy their cylinder block is made of, but a lot don't know, and don't care, how many cylinders there are. They only care (somewhat) about how it drives. And it is certainly possible to have a language with all the theoretically nice features, but offering horrible user experience for a specific purpose. Part of it is just marketing, but part of it is also optimization with a different purpose in mind.

For example, his purpose, and Julia's main use case, is often different from that of either a language designer or a software engineer: e.g. performance and fast prototyping are first order concerns (together with a decent scientific library), and everything else, like longevity, ability of future code reuse, or simplifying work of teams are way, way down the list. The reason of course is that ~90% of code is written by one person, for himself, to effectively run once and produce one paper, and to be never touched by anyone ever again. At least, this is what I see in my field, which is largely dominated by Matlab (and Matlab-like syntax is definitely a huge asset here).

Hmm, this is an accurate description on how a lot of research work is run.But then there are the cases where that data analysis that was put together within a week is suddenly used by the whole research group, amended, extended and used with more and more data. Sometimes someone even sticks a GUI on top, plots and consecutive analysis steps are added, etc.

And this is when you really want to have a language that can be used to build up real abstraction.

And then you want to interface your code to someone else's, written in something that is not your pet language, and you find yourself spitting text or binary matrices through pipes. IME it's easier to decide on a data serialization format at the start, and use whatever language works best for each piece.

The problem with most cars is they're designed by professionals, who tend to worry about things some people don't much care for. Safety, security, reliability, and so forth.

That is exactly how many people will pick a car. They assume the cars already have these properties as a minimal requirement, and then proceed to pick one based on how it looks and how comfortable it is &c.

I didn't pick up an anti-intellectual tone.

His point is the same way I feel: stuff like type systems and homoiconicity (I don't even know what that means) don't interest me. I'd rather think about the work that I'm doing.

Also, these things are a step or two above my level of understanding (but probably not the op's).

I do care about security, thread safety, modularity, etc... but I can't really contribute to the debate about how we get there.

I personally care deeply about strong static typing as well as the work that I'm doing.

How is this anti-intellectual? Most languages are designed by language geeks by definition. And language geeks tend to worry about the things mentioned. And he doesn't care about these things because they've been largely irrelevant for the work he's had to do.

But then the rest of his article is precisely about how they're relevant. For example he says he doesn't care about type systems, and then his only code example is showing off Julia's type-specialization feature. Maybe he just means he doesn't care about the theory behind why it works, e.g. he likes to fly on planes but doesn't care to learn aerospace engineering himself (which is fine).

Because those things are actually hugely important, he spends the rest of the article showing how important they are. He is simply too ignorant to recognize his own ignorance, and revels in this fact. He starts out with "I dun need no fancy book learnin!" and you don't see how it is anti-intellectual?

There's two issues here:

1. A pretty significant amount of code is PHP serving broken HTML + Javascript, stuff which favours pragmatism over purity (to the degree that even some of the most pragmatic people hate it with a passion). These languages are popular because the authors focused on delivering results, not naval gazing.

2. When a language community starts talking up its the theoretical features with a passion, it's a red flag. Odds are, the documentation will be obtuse, and the community will bite noobs who don't know the theory. Even if they try to be nice to beginners, it's against their instincts to give simplified (if technically incorrect) answers. If your High School math teacher told you that "differentiation finds the slop of a graph, by finding f(x+e) / f(e) where e is really small", she was lying, but it's a good kind of lie.

A pedantic explanation will just confuse people, and stop most of them from understanding it well enough to learn how to appreciate the technicalities.

Your issue number 1 does actually (as I understand it) not apply to Julia, since it is actually really well designed and not tinkering. Matlab is the PHP of scientific computing ;)

About 2: The Haskell community is one of the friendliest I know, yet, it is one with the strictest theoretical background.

PHP was popular for a number of reasons, I think mostly because of the easy mix of HTML and PHP tags as well as the ready-to-run Apache/PHP/Mysql setup. From a maintainability standpoint, a lot of people suffer from this.

Its the same point that people have had about "Clean Code" and Unit tests. Some think it keeps them from getting work done. When a unit test of mine suddenly fails, I silently know, that some other person has just now also broken their code and does not know about this, will find out eventually but will not see why immediately. While they try to find their bug, I have already fixed mine and implemented tons of features in the time.

And he misunderstands the "cowboy" reference in "cowboy programmers." The reference I believe is to lone operator who views himself as having superior skills and so does not integrate with the group, follow the coding rules and procedures, and generally makes work for others colleagues, often while ignoring their communications or responding to them with condescension.

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