Reading Peter Seibel's Coders at Work, and this is Joe Armstrong on the issue:
>Also, I think today we’re kind of overburdened by choice. I mean, I just had Fortran. I don’t think we even had shell scripts. We just had batch files so you could run things, a compiler, and Fortran. And assembler possibly, if you really needed it. So there wasn’t this agony of choice. Being a young programmer today must be awful—you can choose 20 different programming languages, dozens of framework and operating systems and you’re paralyzed by choice. There was no paralysis of choice then. You just start doing it because the decision as to which language and things is just made—there’s no thinking about what you should do, you just go and do it.
For context this book is copyrighted 2009 so this interview is more than a decade old, and I'm sure many things have changed since then.
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33056052
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>Also, I think today we’re kind of overburdened by choice. I mean, I just had Fortran. I don’t think we even had shell scripts. We just had batch files so you could run things, a compiler, and Fortran. And assembler possibly, if you really needed it. So there wasn’t this agony of choice. Being a young programmer today must be awful—you can choose 20 different programming languages, dozens of framework and operating systems and you’re paralyzed by choice. There was no paralysis of choice then. You just start doing it because the decision as to which language and things is just made—there’s no thinking about what you should do, you just go and do it.
For context this book is copyrighted 2009 so this interview is more than a decade old, and I'm sure many things have changed since then.
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33056052
Points: 4
# Comments: 2
Continue reading...
