[self-interest] Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and..

[Steve Dekorte]

On 2009-08-05, at 7:31 AM, brassplume wrote:
> PHP and Perl are simple languages. Not Self. You can be a crap  
> programmer and do lots of useful CRUD things with those languages.  
> Semantically the are complicated. And ultimately they're limiting  
> because of that. The control structures are built in and obvious. In  
> Self, Smalltalk, or Lisp, you need to bring a lot of knowledge to  
> either build your own or see how somebody added objects/classes to  
> do that.


"The control structures are built in and obvious"

How are they any more obvious?

FWIW, I've noticed that there is an inverse correlation between a  
person's sensitivity to negatives of X and the popularity of X among  
their peers and that this effect is so powerful that it is often  
confused with objective judgement.

For example, a window's developer friend of mine who happily deals  
with the complexity of C++ templates (which are Turing complete!)  
claimed he was unable to wrap his head around Objective-C 's infix  
message syntax. Had Microsoft used Objective-C, I suspect his opinion  
of what is obvious would be quiet different.

I can see the evolutionary benefit of this mental trait for getting  
groups of individuals to cooperate but blindness to it's influence is  
IMO the largest barrier to human social, political and technological  
progress.