This is a great analogy. Alcohol, cars are highly regulated. Facebook etc less so. Facebook will be much more heavily regulated in the coming years. It won't be banned, unless it breaks the regulations.
In the market of digital services, Europe is as good as non-existent. Maybe I can come up with one or two names in the top 20 of the most successful software enterprises.
And those are probably already dinosaurs compared to most recent developments on that market.
Europe is exceptionally bad at creating their own services. Maybe because it is just too convenient to use American ones or that there isn't really any venture capital available here. But the fact remains.
Subjectively, it seems we often also lack the openness for new ideas compared to America, especially around older generations.
Europe doesn't even know the significance of freedom right know. Not taking the right decision is often less important than owning it yourself. Americans seem to get that. Most of the time at least.
You forget that Europe has been ruined by WW2. It's dependence of US(military and technologically) has always been part of the plan.
Europe is also very fragmented and there was hope the EU could fix that but Brexit and other internal and external factors(i.e Russia, China, Tump's policy etc) seem oppose a cohesive, united Europe for obvious reasons.
It has little to nothing to do with "openness" for new ideas. It's more about a chain of unfortunate events.
What does Huawei dominance in 5G and its ban has to do with "openness" or new ideas?
New Zealand has a senior government position non-ironically named "Chief Censor." They don't even pretend to have free speech, and certainly don't get to lecture anyone on moral bankruptcy.
If there was an existing AI solution in place anywhere in world capable to detect a suicide, I'd agree - but there's nothing even close to that at the moment. You can't blame a company for not using something that's technologically probably not even possible to make reliably today. And what if it's not "morally scalable", you shut it down? You break it by force like it was done with Bell system? Would having "Face corp." and "Book corp." really solve any of these issues, which are fundamentally a problem of human nature?
> If there was an existing AI solution in place anywhere in world capable to detect a suicide, I'd agree - but there's nothing even close to that at the moment.
Should we let the technical infeasibility of them profitably solving a problem that they themselves have created be our moral compass?
> You can't blame a company for not using something that's technologically probably not even possible to make reliably today.
The point IMO is not to assign blame. It's to create legislation for the betterment of society. You can agree or disagree that it would be better, but don't reduce it to a blame game.
> And what if it's not "morally scalable", you shut it down? You break it by force like it was done with Bell system? Would having "Face corp." and "Book corp." really solve any of these issues, which are fundamentally a problem of human nature?
As I said, as far as I'm concerned, that's their problem. You implement the legal framework necessary to uphold a desirable moral standard and let that have its effect on the market. In those terms it's irrelevant how Facebook fares.
And no, this is not fundamentally a problem of human nature. Millions-to-billion user social networks have only been a problem for a brief moment of human history. Much like other problems throughout history it might go away some day. Not by itself, but by systematically working on improving the human condition.
That definitely does not tally with my experience in Manchester and Liverpool. Nobody worth any real money lives in the city, they're all in big Cheshire villas.
The young professionals might like to play Friends for a bit, but as soon as they spawn or make real money they're off in a blast.
I'd be surprised if Birmingham were any different, considering that city centre in practice is almost non-existent.
London and Edinburgh are the only places with real elites living in cities, but they are the exception to the rule.
Odd languages attract above average programmers, if nothing else than because they are engaged. Small teams are more productive than large teams, because there are almost no communication problems. I wonder how much is due to this?
I came here to make the same point. The real test would be to take those same Lisp or Smalltalk programmers, and have them work in Java. I’ll bet you see the same increase in productivity. It’s the people, not the language.
I have code, for work, in: FoxPro, Delphi, Python, VB, VB.NET, C#, F#, Obj-C, Swift, Rust, Sql, Js.
I rewrite apps and codebases, and move them. I rewrite the same stuff many times, and make my own pseudo-ORM is my main thing when learn new languages.
Absolutely I'm more productive in some Langs than others:
Amazing at:
- Fox, Delphi, Python (#1), F#, Swift
Average, low:
- VB, C#, Obj-C, Js
Barely move:
- Rust (this is my last lang, and also doing a programming language that I have sketch in python, swift, f#. The task hit against the hardest and weakest parts of rust).
I look at C, C++ and my instinct tell me I will suck forever at them. Same Haskell. Ocalm? I will fly. Lisp? Nope, that crazy stuff never click. Kdb+? I don't know, maybe.
I don't buy the meme "the language not matter, is the people" because languages are made FOR the people. And some stuff click on you or not.
Whenever I hear "it might work for you, or not", my ears perk up. Not understanding when something works or not is a great question. It's something to explore. It's not the endgame.
I briefly studied French in college, and to say it "didn't click" would be an understatement. It was the worst grade I got in any class ever, by far. And yet, even the dumbest French person is fluent from when they were just a kid. It's probably not the case that French is simply impossible for some people to learn. Something else is going on.
Couldn't it be that we simply haven't figured out a good way to teach programming languages yet? Software is still generally "go read the reference manual online and you're good", but most other mature fields have moved beyond that. Boeing is in hot water this month in part because they essentially used that as pilot training for the 737 MAX, and it's clear to everyone that this is not an adequate way to learn a complex new technical tool.
Unlike you, I don't find Swift particularly productive (and I've written tens of thousands of lines in it!) -- but maybe with the right training, I would.
Learning a language as an adult is completely different from learning as a kid. Your hypothetical “dumbest French person” would not have been able to learn French as an adult, the same way that the most physically fit 100 year old could not survive the falls down the stairs that 3 year olds do without even crying.
It's not a "meme", it's just my speculation. Yes, languages are made for people, but the people aren't all the same. TFA overlooked the point that maybe it is more curious and more talented people who make their way to esoteric languages.
So we are on agreement (how weird that happened often on HN, at least on tech!)
I also add that you need to explore that languages to become talented.
I'm pretty certain to be an average developer, at most. Not because low self-esteem, but after 20+ years I have know people above and below.
BUT, the use of many paradigms have help me to look like much better than if I have been stuck on a single lang (or paradigm).
I credit, by intuition, to FoxPro in how I tend to be better on RDBMS work. Delphi, for how build UIs and have certain understanding of low level. And so on.
Every new lang/paradigm make you better, and that lessons carry over.
One of my favorite anecdotes was someday I was stuck with C# solving a task, that even with libraries can't get.
I think to myself "let do that on python". I solve it in no time. I port it to C#, and almost get the same line count!
Yes, you do need to explore languages to become talented in using languages. I think you are not an average developer if you are learning and using so many languages, pretty much by definition.
I consider "talent" as the amount skills you have at your disposal. I think a average idiot will be more productive the more broad is their horizons ;)
> I came here to make the same point. The real test would be to take those same Lisp or Smalltalk programmers, and have them work in Java. I’ll bet you see the same increase in productivity. It’s the people, not the language.
A good example to strengthen this argument is Petr Mitrichev who has won numerous competitive programming competitions and his language of choice is... Pascal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Mitrichev
Because those esoteric languages are better. The comment I responded to points out that TFA makes the unreasonable assumption that the Java programmers and the Smalltalk programmers are equally talented. And that perhaps what is going on is that the people attracted to explore beyond Java are more curious and perhaps more interested in their craft. If that is the case, then I predict these people will be better in Java, even if it isn't their first choice.
For one thing, highly popular languages tend to have communities which are flooded by people who can't use those languages, can't describe the problems they are solving, or can't understand basic programming concepts.
Like, it wouldn't even matter to me if PHP is a good language if I have to sift through thousands of comments of "I did this and it worked" without any description of why it worked, why it is better than other ideas, or what problem it is even meant to solve.
>I came here to make the same point. The real test would be to take those same Lisp or Smalltalk programmers, and have them work in Java. I’ll bet you see the same increase in productivity. It’s the people, not the language.
They write a mini-lisp in Java and obfuscate it. I've been on project where this had happened.
> above average programmers, if nothing else than because they are engaged
But are you really "above average" if you are incapable of actually producing something large scale because your temperament is such that you can't stand working in a "boring" "unproductive" language?
It's sort a tortoise or hare type situation: the hare runs really fast but if that doesn't win you the race, who cares? There is an even rarer breed of programmer who operates as both the tortoise or the hare. Those are the true "above average" programmers in my view, but you can pretty much exclude the elite crowd of folks who "refuse to program in Java" or will confine their entire job search to companies that use their favorite language from that category.
Good point. When I discovered Clojure and saw the light after listening to Rich Hickey's sermons on The Mount I found it almost impossible to work with OO code. Years later I asked myself if this had actually benefited me professionally, other than simply broadening my mind, and I concluded it hadn't because it limited me to the tiny number of Clojure jobs available and ruled-out earning good money working on existing code. In recent years I've had to reverse-engineer this experience and get to grips with the likes of Java, Kotlin, Ruby and Python.
> But are you really "above average" if you are incapable of actually producing something large scale
Wasn't the OP's conclusion that large scale was due to not being able to scale the team into the hundreds and not any limitation of a small team?
There's only so much code that a handful of programmers can write and maintain in any language. The scaling issues comes up when you need to make your team a lot larger.
Yes. I think one of the interesting things in software is the irrational amount of productivity that a small team can accomplish, but that it can only be done by doing things in a way that can never be executed by a 50 person team.
So it is possible for 3 - 10 developers to maintain a product that perhaps, would need 50 developers using fully maintainable methods. But the 3-10 developers can never produce what 500 developers can. And there's a valley of death between about 10 and 30 where you actually go backwards. With 20 developers you might accomplish less than with 10 unless you very carefully and strictly compartmentalise the team (at which point you have two teams of 10 developers that don't interact ...).
