> Am currently reading "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman, this is a perfect example of a base-rate fallacy (something addressed in the book).
I disagree that Dewie's individual experience constitutes a "base-rate". If you're referring to something else as a "base-rate", you'll have to spell it our more clearly for me, as I'm having difficulty seeing how to apply it validly here.
> Absent any other evidence, one should assume the amount of complaining a language would get is about proportional to how widely it's used.
That's reasonable, and my own experiences and anecdotes don't turn out to be capital D Data. However, neither are Dewie's experiences and anecdotes. And what I would argue isn't reasonable is assuming the amount of complaining that one individual developer hears about a language we get is about proportional to how widely it's used. The data set is far too small to extrapolate that far.
My own experience is that the amount of complaining about a language I hear about varies wildly by what my peers in my communities happen to be using at the time. I went years without hearing any complaints about PHP... and then someone gets employed writing it and it spikes up to the language I hear the most complaints about. I'd be very absurd to assume that PHP went from not used very widely at all to the most used language in that same timeframe!
While I cast a wide net, my time is finite and I pay more attention to some communities than others, quite understandably biasing what I hear significantly.
> So the lack of complaining (asserted by the parent) about C# might be as much a reflection on how widely it's used, than on the language itself.
Granted, but "might be" is a far cry from "is" or "should be assumed to be". Indeed, I wouldn't suggest that "C# might generally be less rant-inducing" to be worthy of assuming either. Dewie "might be" not hanging around .NET devs, but even that's a terribly poor assumption -- I know plenty of devs who don't complain about languages I consider absolutely terrible.
I disagree that Dewie's individual experience constitutes a "base-rate". If you're referring to something else as a "base-rate", you'll have to spell it our more clearly for me, as I'm having difficulty seeing how to apply it validly here.
> Absent any other evidence, one should assume the amount of complaining a language would get is about proportional to how widely it's used.
That's reasonable, and my own experiences and anecdotes don't turn out to be capital D Data. However, neither are Dewie's experiences and anecdotes. And what I would argue isn't reasonable is assuming the amount of complaining that one individual developer hears about a language we get is about proportional to how widely it's used. The data set is far too small to extrapolate that far.
My own experience is that the amount of complaining about a language I hear about varies wildly by what my peers in my communities happen to be using at the time. I went years without hearing any complaints about PHP... and then someone gets employed writing it and it spikes up to the language I hear the most complaints about. I'd be very absurd to assume that PHP went from not used very widely at all to the most used language in that same timeframe!
While I cast a wide net, my time is finite and I pay more attention to some communities than others, quite understandably biasing what I hear significantly.
> So the lack of complaining (asserted by the parent) about C# might be as much a reflection on how widely it's used, than on the language itself.
Granted, but "might be" is a far cry from "is" or "should be assumed to be". Indeed, I wouldn't suggest that "C# might generally be less rant-inducing" to be worthy of assuming either. Dewie "might be" not hanging around .NET devs, but even that's a terribly poor assumption -- I know plenty of devs who don't complain about languages I consider absolutely terrible.