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.

>>25

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.

There's no "entire system" in a sense of shared goal, there's a shitton of independent fiercely competing entities, and if hiring programming Übermensch who are 100x more productive in HASCAL than your average drooling retard were actually possible, then someone would do just that and get a shitton of money.

This actually happens with a surprising regularity, Axe-drenched RoR dudes come to mind as maybe the most prominent example, but actually look at any fad, like node.js or MongoDB, in your imaginary world all of that shit would've been dead on arrival simply because PHP coders don't already know it.

Want to shift the goalposts from that to them being unable to grok your favorite language? That's a venerable tradition, Paul Graham did that with his "Lisp is unpopular because average programmers can't understand lambdas", too bad a couple of years later Visual Basic got lambdas and nobody batted an eye. Do you really want to double down on the idea that Ruby's Smalltalk style OOP or CPS as used in various trendy js libraries are a walk in the park compared to, I don't know, literal symbol substitution in Lisp macros?

But also, you see, there's also this little thing called "open source". Like just for one example, one morning Linus Torvalds woke up and decided that he had it enough with bitkeeper and wrote git. Like, single-handedly, until it was actually useful, without any pointy-haired boss worrying about being able to replace him with an Indian. He could've used fucking Coq as the implementation language, and everyone who wanted to contribute would be, OK, guess we have to learn Coq now. Because Linus Torvalds is actually pretty close to being a programming Übermensch who doesn't need no help from drooling code monkeys to get his stuff out the door and went on record saying that he likes C because it's relatively hard and keeps idiots away.

Where's the awesome open source software written by the 200 IQ geniuses who can fully appreciate the elegance, conciseness, and beauty that HASCAL allows them to express? Why nobody uses it?