Paul Graham: just another mental midget

Paul Graham says languages he ``cavalierly dismissed'' before he ``even tried writing programs in'' ``have been bad'' and ``just smelled wrong'' because in his brain, they were ``designed for other people to use'', despite the creators of these languages being their biggest promoters. This is the mentality of a mental midget.

Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.

It may seem cavalier to dismiss a language before you've even tried writing programs in it. But this is something all programmers have to do. There are too many technologies out there to learn them all. You have to learn to judge by outward signs which will be worth your time. I have likewise cavalierly dismissed Cobol, Ada, Visual Basic, the IBM AS400, VRML, ISO 9000, the SET protocol, VMS, Novell Netware, and CORBA, among others. They just smelled wrong.

>>19
Yeah, i bet you enjoy manually resolving package dependencies and patch the headers by hand.
The problem is wasting my time on trivial, useless actions that should be automated by design.
Typing one-off solutions by hand is not going to teach you anything and its easy to make mistakes.