Are we in the worst of all possible worlds?

Good people are constantly being supplanted in favour of the greedy and sociopathic, over and over and over again.

Imagine if Gary Kildall had made the deal with IBM as was supposed to happen, instead of Gates.

http://www.tomrolander.com/GaryKildall/In%20memory%20of%20Gary%20Kildall.htm

Gary Kildall tried to push elegance in software. Imagine sane computing. Imagine if this person had influence over computing that Gates ended up having.

Actually, I can't imagine it, because some other monster would have come along. The demons are everywhere.

The human race is comprised of mostly nasty, selfish monsters. Our being conscious is a mistake and we shouldn't even be here, but that is a topic for another day.

People who try to do good seem to get stopped before they go too far, while the greedy monsters are completely free to run amok.

>>24

Have anything to say about the contents of the example?

It's not related to any of the ``mathematical beauty'' I've ever come across, that's why I didn't comment on it.

it's not a coincidence that it's one of the worst parts of sepples.

A couple of counterexamples off the top of my head: Haskell is basically just lazy System F, and ML is an even simpler strict version - these systems do not suffer for their simple and ``theoretical'' (for lack of a better word) foundations, they are indeed the entire point of them, and are (relatively) successful for precisely that.

or "average programmers" dragging you down (you are supposed to be Übermensch, remember?).

You want to write the project in Haskell because you know that you can encode all sorts of useful correctness information in its type system, letting you spend less time debugging and have less of a chance of it breaking in production (thus saving everyone time and money), your boss can't spell ``Haskell'' and is much more interested in having it written it in PHP because it's the ``industry standard''.

Real world programming is not about the best way to lay bricks, it's about the best way to get the most bricks laid when the people doing it are drooling retards who can barely spell ``PHP''. We absolutely get dragged down by the average, the entire system hinges on the fact that you are replaceable and if most of the people available to replace you are retards, then you're not going to be allowed to do anything they can't - this includes using better tools beyond the grasp (or motivation to master) of the lowest common denominator.

You're saying that ``elegance'' isn't related at all to what gets things out the door, but neither is what you think of as ``pragamatism'', at least on the level of individual ability. What matters is what is pragmatic to your boss, and a huge factor in that is how stupid everyone else is, because that's going to be your replacement some day.