The Hard Test

It's recently come to my attention that there are smart, capable programmers out there who are resistant to learning and/or using more powerful programming languages.

I have to admit, in hindsight, syntax can be a huge deterrent. The first thing I used to do when I saw Lisp's parentheses was try to parse them like parentheses in other languages — basically implementing a stack in my head. This is extremely difficult. And the parens just make the code ugly. Something like Haskell on the other hand, I look at that and it's just beautiful.

When I started coding in Scheme and mentioned to someone more familiar with it that I was having difficulty with the parens, he pointed out the fact that you don't have to parse the parentheses in Lisp or Scheme. Just use an editor like Emacs that automatically indents properly based on the parens, and simply look at the indentation.

Oh. That makes things easier.

But besides the whole high learning curve, Lisp in general is very abstract. And thinking abstractly is hard. Now, people don't like doing things that are hard. Why would anyone want to do something that was hard when they could do it an easier way. And this is exactly the reason why most people avoid more abstract programming languages. However, that very abstractness is what makes them so powerful. As long as people believe "anything that can be done in language X, I can do in my language", they will never advance. So many people fall into this trap because of the Turing-machine idea of expressiveness.

But programming isn't only about expression, it's about understanding.

It's a shame though that people who are smart enough to work with abstract tools shy away from them because they are hard. Due to the fact that they are hard to use, the majority of people can't use them to their full potential. Therefore, anyone who has the ability can move ahead of the pack.

The fact that something is hard is never a good reason to not do it. In fact, it's often a reason to do it. If I'm faced with a choice where I seem unable to decide, I ask myself, which option is harder. Because that is probably the right choice. I'm probably only considering the other one to avoid the difficulty in the right choice.