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Comment by copergi | Hacker News Reader

>Every year, on a Haskell thread, someone calls me a noob for not knowing it.

That sounds a lot like you putting words in other people's mouths. I've never seen anything like that.

>Then you get like the same 3 or 4 dudes talking about how it's only a matter of time until the enterprise picks it up and all the dumb people go away.

Or that.

>I just want to see a working to-do list application, or anything resembling that size before we start the name-calling.

Now I am even more confused. Why do you want to call people names, who do you want to call names, and why do you want to see some random toy app first?

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"In fact the things that make Haskell better are probably difficult to appreciate by a lot of younger programmers who are using relatively new languages and frameworks like Node and Rails"

Are you reading this stuff? I'm not going to talk to you if you're just being a dick. I know you can read, so stop being obtuse. Come up with something, quick.

Yes, I am reading it. That does not say anything even remotely close to "ulisesrmzroche is a noob for not knowing haskell". I am not being a dick, I am being polite and trying to understand where you are coming from. I don't see how insulting me helps either of us, only how it makes your claims that "haskell people keep insulting me" rather hypocritical.

Ok, nevermind dude. You're either not being honest or really can't understand nuance in the English language, which, either or, doesn't give us a lot of room for arguing. Saying 'a lot of younger programmers probably don't appreciate the best parts of haskell' is clear Ageism. I think it's annoying.

>Saying 'a lot of younger programmers probably don't appreciate the best parts of haskell' is clear age-ism

No it isn't.

>I think it's annoying.

Ok, but that doesn't support the claim you made and I questioned.

Are you for real? It's like deja-vu. I guess I should know better by now. There's probably some guy in a lisp thread who has been on my end of this argument for the last 20 years or so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageism#Ageist_prejudice

I know what ageism is. You quoted something that is not an example of it. Given that this is entirely pointless, would you mind if we went back to the actual discussion?

The dude that said just said it was 'experience-ism', do I have to explain what nuance is? You've gotta help me out here, I can't do it all on my own.

All you keep saying is 'no its not'. And then trying to move on as if that's the final word. Not interested in talking to you bro, we're not going to come to any kind of understanding.

As a 21 year old this is not ageism in the slightest, it is reality that as you see more and more problems the applicability of some solutions becomes more apparent. For example, when talking to seasoned engineers who have written a lot of concurrent code they immediately understand the value of purity, and immutable data because they have been burned by the problems that crop up when you try to write threaded programs using shared mutable memory.

On the other hand if you take a 20 year old student still doing their undergraduate degree (like many of the people in the classes I TA), and try to explain the value of immutable data, many of them just don't get it. It has nothing to do with their intelligence or age, but the fact that they haven't written enough code to develop a sense of why such a thing would be useful.

If you want example apps their are plenty littering the internet all covering the various web frameworks, for example here is one covering Happstack: http://happstack.com/docs/crashcourse/index.html

Since I said that, let me be perfectly clear. It's not ageism, it's experience-ism. There are things that you learn when you work on a code base that is 10, 20, 30 years old. There are things you learn when you've been a programmer for 10, 20, 30 years. A lot of the pain Haskell solves isn't apparent in a lot of Node or Rails apps simply because they are so new. That's it, don't read too much into it.

Omg, that's exactly the same thing but more PC. Whatever, I hate you HN. I'm taking my ball and going home.

Hey, don't take it too bad. If you say anything negative about certain topics you will get downvotes. It's mostly because people not in love with certain topics have learned to just leave them alone and it's left a big echo chamber where anything positive will be upvoted and anything negative will be downvoted.

You'll notice this by seeing that in non-Haskell threads, critical remarks about Haskell are upvoted, while in 'Haskell threads' such as this one where an echo chamber forms, anything critical about Haskell will be downvoted. It's an interesting behavior, but it says a lot more about certain cliques than it does about HN.

Don't worry about it too much and get on with actually using practical tools to solve real problems and leave the echo chamber in their own peaceful world. Everyone is much better off.

Wow, that's smug. My comment had nothing to do with Haskell. He said I was being ageist when I said there are some things that only become apparent with experience.

Hey don't be the white person complaining about racism or the man complaining about sexism. If young people weren't getting a shot in the tech industry because of discrimination then I'd be a tad more sensitive to your protestations. But as it is, you're irrationally sticking your head in the sand. If you don't think that learn things and come to new insights that take years to develop then there's nothing I can say to convince you. But if you stick with it for a while, come back to me in 10 years and let's do a code review on what you wrote today and then we'll discuss if you still think I'm ageist for saying there are particular lessons learned through experience.

Reverse-agism is part of an egalitarian mindset of many HN commenters, who believe experience is more important than individual variation in skill. For them, skill and ability increase with experience, so it is an objective fact that young developers as a group are going to be worse by most measures.

So when someone out of college makes more than someone with 10 years experience, they assume this must be due to agism, since the 10 years experience must, in their view, be more important than being one of the top graduates of that year.

On the original comment, I usually associate Haskell with younger programmers, since it is taught in many schools like MIT and UW. So I found the comment a bit grating since I thought Haskell was the one thing we could have.

"On the original comment, I usually associate Haskell with younger programmers"

Huh. FWIW, I associate it more with older programmers. Certainly, some of the more interesting and visible members of the Bay Area meetup are older than me and I'm not fresh out of school.

What a ponderous false dichotomy. No one believes experience matters more than individual variation in skill. Don't put words in my mouth.

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