18 February 2007

Language of the gods? C.

When you look at popular articles/posts about programming in the last few years, one topic comes back over and over and each time its extremely popular - the “enlightenment” that comes with learning Common Lisp, Scheme, Haskell or sometimes yet another not-so-mainstream language like Smalltalk. Recently people started even bragging about the “language of the gods”. I think the thing that started the buzz was the “Howto become a hacker” text. But I didn’t seen any particular too much wonderful Lisp applications written by ESR…

After thinking about it for a while, come on, it’s total bullshit. Someone can conclude from those articles that learning macros, continuations, monads or whatever will turn one into a alpha programmer, or a super-human. Yes, those are all interesting concepts, they stretch your mind, you get a better programmer as you learn it. I greatly appreciate it and I try to learn things like that myself all the time. But don’t get trapped into believing that this is THAT important - there are other as important or even more important fields no-one is blogging about. Its also a lot like saying that just getting a new guitar will make you a better guitarist. The language is just a tool, maybe it’s time to stress more other topics like problem solving techniques, good design skills, which are current all the time.