Paul Graham: just another mental midget

Paul Graham says languages he ``cavalierly dismissed'' before he ``even tried writing programs in'' ``have been bad'' and ``just smelled wrong'' because in his brain, they were ``designed for other people to use'', despite the creators of these languages being their biggest promoters. This is the mentality of a mental midget.

Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.

It may seem cavalier to dismiss a language before you've even tried writing programs in it. But this is something all programmers have to do. There are too many technologies out there to learn them all. You have to learn to judge by outward signs which will be worth your time. I have likewise cavalierly dismissed Cobol, Ada, Visual Basic, the IBM AS400, VRML, ISO 9000, the SET protocol, VMS, Novell Netware, and CORBA, among others. They just smelled wrong.

Mental midget madness.

Mental midget middle managers fresh off the street who load me up with finicky end-user requests and wonder why I never get them done, resulting in them thinking I'm incompetent. Yet, they don't realize I've got a backlog of R&D tasks far too advanced for them to understand and the CTO is on an extended vacation for 2 months leaving me with no one to explain to them to fuck off.

Mental midget so-called "C++" programmers who are stuck in the C++98 days and give you a blank stare when you try to explain to them the finer points of pattern matching, multi-dispatch, algebraic types, concepts and the likes and how it can be done with sfinae/enable_if/decltype/deduction guides/etc. They then fuck up your code and take it in a completely opposite direction of what you had originally intended, shitting all over it with Java-esque OOPs turds, tons of sloppy whitespace and redundant gradeschool comments.

Example:

// dereference the value here and pass it to the lambda, duhhhhh
task(*value)

// get a Data future from the service, just making sure you know that because I think everyone is as retarded as me hurrr
std::future<Data> data = service->RequestData();

Don't get me started on the mental midget QA testers.

Civilization is going down the drain. If only we had a means of filtering out the noise. It's a shame the mental midget MBAs are over hyping AI again, thus guaranteeing a second AI Winter is only beyond the precipice.