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Comment by i336_ | Hacker News Reader

I see what you mean.

POSIX was basically a committee ratifying things that a bunch of systems people had come up with. So it gets to the point, it's reasonably concise, and there's little noise to wade through to do most things.

Java was slowly designed by committee, taking inspiration from other languages.

I just thought of something. Maybe it's relevant.

IBM said "let make something totally different with this 8086 system, let's make everything open and not lock it down." Apple said "let's do something different with the Macintosh, let's enforce absolute control over the hardware and software so we can perfectly unify them."

Maybe Sun got fed up with SunOS and said "let's make a language and runtime that's totally different - something so different that it resists influence by platform architecture."

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I think Java's "all OOP, all the time" approach influenced their standard library design. I don't like the result.

"Modernism was based on a kind of arrogance, a set of monocultural blinders that elevated originality above all else, and led designers to believe that if they thought of something cool, it must be considered universally cool. That is, if something's worth doing, it's worth driving into the ground to the exclusion of all other approaches. Look at the use of parentheses in Lisp or the use of white space as syntax in Python. Or the mandatory use of objects in many languages, including Java. All of these are ways of taking freedom away from the end user 'for their own good'. They're just versions of Orwell's Newspeak, in which it's impossible to think bad thoughts. We escaped from the fashion police in the 1970s, but many programmers are still slaves of the cyber police" ( http://m.linuxjournal.com/article/3394 ).

Very very interesting thoughts, thanks very much for this comment. Would +10 if I could.

The article was an excellent read too.

I've noticed that a lot of people around the 18-25 demographic (and some outside that range) have mental health issues that (among other catastrophes) cause detrimental effects to emotional development. I was thankfully able to get off this train myself using alternative therapies about ten years ago, but one of the things I observed about myself was a tendency to hone in on one specific idea present in something I was thinking about and then redefine what I was focusing on on the basis of and in terms of that idea, in many situations irreversibly discarding any other possible interpretations. I essentially didn't have the capacity to wield concepts that required careful balance between a series of discrete ideas.

I wonder a lot about how much of the noise margin present in current research and work is caused by related developmental issues.

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