He is right in most of his critics.But, worse is better.
We computer science guys, and especially those with background in maths, always want to have frameworks reduced to orthogonal concepts that recombine in all possible ways to create very diverse outcome. This leads to algebraic-type formal systems that are very beautiful and powerful in their domains.
You can rarely model a real-world domain in such a minimalistic and mathematical way. Think about it: if it was easy and useful, the natural languages we used would benefit a lot from being unambiguous, minimalistic and mathematical. We have neither evolved to use such languages nor successfully created ones outside narrow artificial domains This, I think, is an important lesson for computer science.
Recently we have seen the rise of Perl, and later RoR. Why are they successful, despite having fuzzy concepts and leaking abstractions? I think this is because they try to mimic natural languages, and put the mathematical clarity aside.
Perl's author is a linguist and had consciously borrowed natural language characteristics:
http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html
DHH has emphasized a lot that he wants his DSLs to look like natural languages (don't have a reference right now). Perhaps this means something.
We computer science guys, and especially those with background in maths, always want to have frameworks reduced to orthogonal concepts that recombine in all possible ways to create very diverse outcome. This leads to algebraic-type formal systems that are very beautiful and powerful in their domains.
You can rarely model a real-world domain in such a minimalistic and mathematical way. Think about it: if it was easy and useful, the natural languages we used would benefit a lot from being unambiguous, minimalistic and mathematical. We have neither evolved to use such languages nor successfully created ones outside narrow artificial domains This, I think, is an important lesson for computer science.
Recently we have seen the rise of Perl, and later RoR. Why are they successful, despite having fuzzy concepts and leaking abstractions? I think this is because they try to mimic natural languages, and put the mathematical clarity aside.
Perl's author is a linguist and had consciously borrowed natural language characteristics: http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html DHH has emphasized a lot that he wants his DSLs to look like natural languages (don't have a reference right now). Perhaps this means something.