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Comment by wcummings | Hacker News Reader

>You're probably more or less correct, but turn things around: from the point of view of the Node.js user, Node does pretty much everything they need, and Erlang does "extra, cool stuff" that, however, they can live without

They're blub programmers

>As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

From PG's "Beating the Averages"

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Yeah, well I know plenty of "blub" programmers who somehow manage to quickly deliver high quality work, who have high profile public projects with their name on them, and make six digit salaries where the first digit is not a "1".

And I know plenty of hipster programmers forever chasing the new language du jour who deliver little but useless abandoned libraries on github. Check out this half working haskell ORM I'm already getting sick of, oh and there's no tests

And I work next to a company that foolishly decided to write their API using scala (don't you know rails doesn't scale) and is now reduced to spending 3 months training new devs because they can't hire to save their lives.

So yeah, tell me about "blub" programmers again. I'll tell you, these "blub" programmers make the friggin' world go round. You like PG's essay but riddle me this - how many lisp startups has YC funded?

A counterpoint: http://basho.com/erlang-at-basho-five-years-later/

Basho uses Erlang, despite not really being able to hire erlang devs (just need to hire and train, for the most part, its a small community), because they feel it gives them a competitive advantage, and even attracts more talented developers.

I'm not arguing that you can't or shouldn't get shit done w/ node.js/Go/PHP/Java/C#/whatever works, just that its ignorant to say "Haskell/Lisp/Erlang/OCaml/Whatever has lots of weird shit I don't need".

It's funny that you call these languages the "language de jour" when Haskell, Lisp, and Erlang are all like 20+ years old.

Well, Basho made an eyes-open decision to go with erlang, after making a thorough analysis of their needs, and well aware they were balancing benefits vs costs. I would say they made a good decision. That's not really the kind of mentality I was railing against, though.

What I can't stand is this kind of condescending smugness - "oh, you're still using X? You're a 'blub' programmer!" as if the only conceivable reason for their choice is that they're lazy, stupid, unmotivated, or all three. Well maybe it's because they like that language, they're productive in it, it's mainstream and hireable, and they don't have any unusual requirements!

I get what PG was trying to say in his essay, but I don't think he expressed it very well. Programmers should try to choose the most productive possible tools, of course. But he's made it rather too easy to simply dismiss anyone who hasn't ended up choosing the most hardcore language possible as "blub programmers", rather than acknowledging they possibly made an informed, pragmatic choice. Engineering is about tradeoffs and throwing around these labels does not improve the discussion.

In my opinion PG over-emphasised the role of lisp in that essay. He conflated the ability to use such a language, ie that he and his colleagues are smart guys, with the language itself. They likely would still have succeeded with perl, TCL, even python was around then. And by doing so, he taught the wrong lesson.

Anyway, I think we agree more than not. And "du jour" actually means "of the day" - not necessarily age. Your point is taken, though.

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