Re: Interesting essay

[Martin Guy <martinwguy@...>]

> http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

Sadly, the essay's factual base is uninformed, throwing out bald statements like
"teams of talented academics were needed to write Haskell" as if they were true.

One man designed and wrote the language that Haskell is an
all-but-exact copy of. They then wrapped it in libraries, someone
designed a proper I/O mechanism for it and some "module" interface I
think. Hardly anything requiring talent or academia.
It's the open-source version of Miranda, with almost no changes other
that wrapping it in libraries, adding a proper I/O mechanism (the
incomprehensible "monads") and a handful of tiny syntactic changes
like changing the line comment chars from || to -- and the modulo
operator from "mod" to the inscrutable, if traditional, "%".

The effect of reading this in the article is a bit like those popular
science TV programs where, if you don't anything about the area
they're talking about, they sound great but when they start to
describe an area you know, you baulk at the falsity of the rubbish
they are saying, or when you witness an historical event in first
person, then see how (and if!) it is described by the news.
It makes you wonder about all the rest of the things they are stating as fact...

So if he's starting from false premises, however brilliant his
reasoning and captivating his argumentation, the conclusions are
unlikely to be worth much.

Of course, it may still be good cause for reflection, to see whether
your own practical experience matches the things he describes.  Just
don't take any of it as true.

    M