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The most common myth about programming (quora.com)
1 point by lisp_me_away on Feb 23, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



I believe the most common myth about programming is that you have to be a genius or you won't ever be good enough.


Careful, logical, thoughtful, and a bit creative are all good.

Thinking oneself to be a genius is generally a handicap from observing hires and peers who have! Dunning–Kruger ahoy...


Cor! That's rather belligerent. There's lots of ways of doing a good programming job, appropriate to the task in hand, and being able to pass a lambda as an argument is not the only measure of such. And I speak as someone lucky enough to have been able to pass and curry lambdas since the 80s, BTW...


I seriously doubt that someone like yourself, who's been currying since the 80s, would invent a language that didn't have multi-line lambdas. And that's the whole point.


For shell scripting?

For all (new) DSLs?

For assembly languages?

Functions as first order entities are nice, but plenty of new code gets written in languages without, eg C, because it's up to the job. Just because a feature is nice and useful for some high level algorithms and languages, does not make it indispensable for all tasks.

I've spent most of my professional life managing without just fine for practical purposes. Unless you'd like to admit special cases such as Java's single method inner classes for example.

The 30kloc of C++ (11) we now have running an energy-saving radiator valve (TRV) does have some lambdas, because they're handy, but I'm not sure that any of them are multi-line to be really specific in rebutting the claim...


This is not about using lambdas everywhere all the time. This is about recognizing that those who create programming languages are not omniscient. I'm not sure why you're so adamant about misrepresenting my point.


This isn't about recognizing omniscience not. This is about bad-mouthing someone who wrote a programming language that doesn't support multi-line lambdas.

(Bad-mouthing: "not at this level of of programming", "This is a really huge problem because only 25% of people are capable of thinking for themselves", with the implication that van Rossum cannot think for himself.)

Explicit in there is the view that one must program with multi-line lambdas in order to be at a higher level of programming competency. A view I disagree with.

Your account name is appropriate as this is sort of smug attitude seems common among Lisp fans. I think they see Lisp (or Scheme) as a jewel of a language, but feel themselves in the doldrums of the programming world. They can't figure out why others aren't using it, and decide that others must simply be sheep.

That's bad-mouthing as well.


Wow, I can have an opinion without having an ulterior motive to do you down in some way!

Your point (I take it that you wrote the linked Quora item then) seemed to be that the language in question was obviously sub-par because it didn't support multi-line lambdas. Which I repeat that I believe to be (a) a false assertion and (b) belligerently expressed.

If you meant something else then it wasn't clear to me and I may have misunderstood, but I'm not 'misrepresenting' you or voting you down or any such thing.

I can tell that you happen to have a (strong) opinion. I happen not to agree with your apparent opinion nor with your way of expressing it.

But you may yet be right and I wrong, for example.




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