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1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 28-Oct-2018 14:29:03 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

   I have recently become aware of a major cultural schism between programmers: Unlike most hackers I've met, Lisp developers don't perceive a transition from Pascal to C as a step up on the programming ladder. Every developer I talked to on IRCnet #coders back in the late 1990s was absolutely adamant that C was the shit and that I should drop Pascal. The other day, I was told, with equal conviction, by people on FreeNode #lisp, that Pascal is in fact the superior language.

   1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 28-Oct-2018 14:31:11 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

      in reply to

      The schism is between people who maintain that low level languages like C are superior, and those who maintain that high level languages like Lisp and Pascal are superior. In my head, this wasn't a schism. I had the high level languages in the "easy for beginners" category and the low level ones in the "used by the pros" category.

      1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 28-Oct-2018 14:33:33 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

         in reply to

         And I figured you'd start out with a high level language to simply grasp programming, and as you got more comfortable with bit banging and optimisations, you'd code exclusively in a low level language, and that would be the pinnacle of your programming career. However, I've gradually come to realise that many people don't attach any particular cred to C skills, and will in fact sometimes view it as one of the early languages that they since abandoned.

         1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 28-Oct-2018 14:34:31 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

            in reply to

            This can also be viewed as a schism between academic formalists and pragmatist hackers.

            1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 28-Oct-2018 14:39:53 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

               in reply to

               If you're a hacker who likes to stay close to the metal, you're obviously going to view C and Rust as great things, but if you're doing things that more closely resemble formal computer science, like processing structured data sets, you're obviously going to view Lisp or Haskell as the pinnacle of software development.