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Comment by swannodette | Hacker News Reader

Carpenters don’t seem to suffer from the same error of judgement. There might be several brands of hammers offering slightly different features, but they all pound nails into wood.

Awful analogy. Software is like capentry (in the small) and architecture (in the large). In both cases materials matter. A language is the material for building a particular kind of structure, not only a tool for building that structure.

Consider the fact that many programming languages fail miserably at concurrency. Is that because you don't know how to use the hammer, or because you picked a really bad material for building that particular kind of structure?

EDIT: Thought about this some more, changed my negative slant on carpentry. Furniture is a delicate and beautiful sculptural practice. In carpentry materials matter just as much.

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He also clearly knows very little about hammers if he thinks they offer "slightly different features".

Not to mention all the different woods.

The software and CS fields are also relatively nascent. Programming languages today are arguably better than the ones we had available to use 20 years ago, whereas a hammer you buy today is pretty much as good as one you could buy 200 years ago.

Like lisp or c (although back then 20 years ago, I actually prefered modula 2 & oberon)?

Yeah,the wooden shaft of 200 years ago is hard to beat. There have been some ergonomic improvements in high-end hammers http://www.stanleytools.com/xhtml/literature/StanleyHandTool..., but simple metal shafts are actually a step backwards.

In a lot of cases old hammers are better, especially when working metal. Most are cast now, rather than forged. The situation with anvils is even worse, with only one company that I'm aware of still making forged anvils.

I suppose that the blacksmith market's a bit saturated though, and anvils tend to last a rather long time.

An adobe/earthcrete Earthship might be a great idea in a southwest desert setting. It would be stupid to build one in a much of Houston.

EDIT: Taking your analogy further, I have occasionally seen the exact same sculpture made out of several different materials, because the sculptor was experimenting. I've also seen such studies where the piece was executed very differently to take advantage of the different potentials of the materials.

I've always hated the "programming languages are just tools" argument too, when it's used in a minimizing fashion. Programming languages, if they are tools, are at least extremely sophisticated tools that differ widely. It's like choosing between shovels, bulldozers, explosives, and backhoes--yes, they're all ways of moving dirt and you can get the job done with just one of them, but it makes all the difference which tool you use.

Perhaps it was an "awful" analogy. I was not saying one language fits all.

For example, I wasn't saying that you shouldn't use a language with good intrinsic support for concurrency on projects that are heavily concurrent. However learning many languages that adhere to a CSP-style concurrency is not going to be as beneficial as learning things such as algorithm design.

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