Three Tribes of Programming (2017)
This post is nice, but...<p>Rich Hickey and Bret Victor here are squashed into overly simple (and&#x2F;or wrong) categories whose descriptions go like &quot;the best programs [...] formally prove correctness&quot; and &quot;beautiful code is more important than beautiful UI&quot;. Both have been very vocal against these points.<p>Jon Blow is definitely not (just) in category 2. &quot;But one of the reasons his last game (The Witness) took so long to write was that he wrote his own engine instead of using something off the shelf [...]. I understand&quot;. He&#x27;ll probably have a heart attack reading this deep, deep assumption that creating his own thing slowed down his unique game rather than enhanced it.<p>As someone who does OCaml (and who maintains ReasonReact), shoving it into the category of &quot;poetry is more important than execution speed&quot; and &quot;code over UI&quot; is exactly what we&#x27;re going _against_. It sucks to emphasize pragmatism, compile &amp; runtime and UI, only to be shoved back into the &quot;poetry&quot; category.<p>I get a weird feeling criticizing a blog post that mostly gets the right idea across but then goes e.g. &quot;don&#x27;t worry, we get that you&#x27;re a poet and care more about that than real-world execution and we empathize with your different perspective&quot; or &quot;we get that you don&#x27;t prioritize writing simple beautiful code&quot;. Like, I _do_ care and these folks _don&#x27;t_ abide by what you&#x27;re describing. There&#x27;s gotta be a name for this.