Recently I decided to bring some life to the Grace homepage. I always expected it to spawn some controversy so I’ve not been surprised by seeing a vocal group of people dismissing its ideas out of hand. One of the most colorful reviews is one that could only make me chuckle: “it’s like Java and PHP gang-raped a Makefile”. I’m not likely to make too much out of reactions like that, these are questions about taste where you just can’t please everyone (and shouldn’t try).
Another reason why I don’t worry about art critics in this context is that, even if Grace were a library with only a single user, it would still help me get my stuff done in a way that I enjoy. It has already proven its value and given me an excellent return on investment using it in a lot of roles. It scratched my itch and that is fine.
I do find some of the negativism on sites like reddit interesting as a phenomenon. I’ve thought of this as a factor of the functional programming cartel that seems to be hanging out at such places. And I realized that this way of looking at it is just as dismissive and childish, so it made me wonder how it can be that there seems to be this great wall between that crowd and the typical ISP/Unix nerd demographic I normally interact with.
When looking at software, I reckon there are two approaches. Some people, when they think about code, see a world of math. For me, what I mostly see is flying bits, an interconnected lego-world of action-reaction patterns that makes intuitive sense. I think both approaches are valid, but obviously they lead to a completely different view on software development.
Naturally I may be suffering from confirmation bias on this subject, but I get the impression that those of us that are more into this direct approach to programming are the ones producing most of the real, living software out there. I can definitely see areas where a more distanced and abstract approach like functional programming can make a difference, but a lot of software development is really about moving bits from A to B, more about rolling up your sleeves and building it than mulling about algorithms and monads; lego, not math.
