Code philosophy review

(tags programming, Ruby, Lisp, failure)

After the disappointment that was Paul Graham's Arc and the bewildering "Portrait of a Noob" by Steve Yegge, which insisted that comments and static typing are useless metadata, I found Planet Emacsen contributor Bryan Murdock's pointer to the discipline and punish blog a refreshing change.

No scratch that. I am questioning my reality now. That programming blog, which takes a practical and weathered engineer tone, has great links about questioning recent programmer fads, especially the current whipping boy (and my favorite comfort squeeze), Ruby.

• "Growth, Syntax, Ruby 1.9, and That Bad Smell You Smell".
• Ruby's Domain Specific Language features are anemic? And I thought Rake was pretty damn cool.
• Steve Yegge is a newbie programmer?
• "The problem with languages like Ruby and Java is that everything is an object and every action is a message, except when it isn’t."
• How could a ex-Jet Propulsion Labs and current Google employee lose faith in Lisp?
• "The Problem with Problems with Patterns".
• "In Defence of (0/:l)(_+_) in Scala" WTF?

All of these great posts I got from discipline and punish blog. Suffice it to say I subscribed.

I am afraid to post anything now about programming now. Best to just keep quiet and fap to Emacs.