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The programmers who live in Flatland

(blog.redplanetlabs.com)
107 points winkywooster | 5 comments | 27 Nov 25 15:44 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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libraryofbabel ◴[07 Dec 25 16:34 UTC] No.46182942[source]▶
Or perhaps, just perhaps, the true higher-dimensional move is realizing that choice of programming language isn’t usually the critical factor in whether a project, system, or business succeeds or fails, and that obsessing over the One True Way is a trap.

It might surprise the author to learn that there are many people who:

1) Have tried lisp and clojure

2) Liked their elegance and expressiveness

3) Have read through SICP and done most of the exercises

4) Would still choose plain old boring easy-to-read always-second-best Python for 90% of use-cases (and probably Rust for the last 10%) when building a real business in the real world.

The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced.

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ModernMech ◴[07 Dec 25 17:21 UTC] No.46183303[source]▶
> The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced.

The talk I posted from Alan Kay is the steel man. I think you've missed the essence of TFA because it's not really about Clojure or lisp.

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libraryofbabel ◴[07 Dec 25 17:35 UTC] No.46183427[source]▶
You may need to explain more? I don’t think I missed the big idea - the metaphor of a separate plane or higher dimension that contains ideas not expressible in the ordinary one is a nice metaphor, and does apply well to some things (Kuhn’s paradigms in history of science come to mind, e.g. Newtonian Mechanics versus Relativity). I just don’t think it really applies well here. What business concepts or thoughts can you express in Clojure that you can’t express in Python or Rust?
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Chinjut ◴[07 Dec 25 22:47 UTC] No.46186089[source]▶
Why are we limiting ourselves to business concepts?
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1. zbentley ◴[08 Dec 25 12:20 UTC] No.46191420{3}[source]▶
Not GP, but … because the overwhelming majority of programming is done in support of businesses selling things?

I’m not just talking about people who program for a living. The majority of academic CS chooses its research directions because of what limits people are running into for business; even privacy-focused software has been commoditized by many business; a large amount of OSS development is by (and often paid for by the employers of) people working for money; heck, after Linus’s initial “just a hobby OS” period even Linux’s contribution base was primarily driven by business needs (even if those needs influenced it via “contributor had a problem at work and committed a solution for it upstream in spare time” as often as “paid contributor upstreamed a change on behalf of their employer”).

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2. ModernMech ◴[08 Dec 25 16:27 UTC] No.46194235[source]▶
Yes and no. Most of the big new languages today are created to support the business of selling things because languages are expensive to make, they don't generate any profit themselves, so the only people who have enough money to fund their development are mega corporations, who act in self-interested ways.

But look at historical languages and why they were created:

Algol - to explore writing algorithms

Fortran - to help scientists write programs using typical math formulas

Matlab - to help write programs in linear algebra

Haskell - to explore lazy program evaluation

ML - to explore how to reason about proof automatically

C - to build an OS

Python - to interface with an OS

LISP - to formalize symbol processing

APL - to explore programs defined over arrays

LOGO - to help young kids to program computers

Prolog - to create a language around the idea of formal logic.

Smalltalk - to create an entire programming system, not just a language

(I've left out C++, Java, and JavaScript because I feel like those languages are mostly about serving business interests)

Pretty much the entire computing landscape over the past 50-70 years has been defined by people writing languages for reasons other than "this is for a business to use to make more money". So if we let business-driven interest dictate the future direction, we will have missed out on all the things that could have been. Would Haskell ever have been invented if businesses interests were the only concern for researchers?

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3. pklausler ◴[08 Dec 25 19:28 UTC] No.46196524[source]▶
Fortran compilers were historically implemented by hardware vendors in order to sell their hardware, and this still largely holds true across the surviving implementations with the exceptions of GNU Fortran (obviously) and nagfor (commercial s/w product). There's a good reason that Cray Research's software group was initially part of its marketing department.
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4. ModernMech ◴[09 Dec 25 00:32 UTC] No.46199777{3}[source]▶
The compilers were, but Fortran wasn't invented so that hardware manufacturers could sell their wares to scientists.
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5. pklausler ◴[09 Dec 25 16:01 UTC] No.46206438{4}[source]▶
It was invented so that IBM could sell more gear to the institutions that employed them.