I think that actually happens to us all. The first time you write an infinite loop to print out that your friend is a doofus to show off is magical. 25 years in and you start to value… other things… that maybe don’t have the childish whimsy and fun.
That’s OK. In the same way that when you start to read books, you might like Blyton, Dahl or diving into a Hardy Boys, by the time you’ve been reading fiction for a few decades your tastes might become a bit more philosophical.
The trick is to introduce these things to people when they’re ready for them, and to not treat those who haven’t experienced them as in some way inferior.
I’m not going to shove Proust down someone’s neck or make them feel dumb for not having read any of his work, in the same way I am going to think carefully about whether somebody would benefit from seeing some Prolog.
What does interest me a lot about this list is that it’s not just a “well, look, I found Clojure and think it’s better than Python, YMMV”, or “if you don’t like or understand Haskell maybe you are just too dumb to grok eigenvectors” brag piece.
There is a thought about what you might get from that language that makes it worth exploring. As a result I might revisit OCaml after a brief and shallow flirtation some years ago, and go and take a look at Coq which I doubt I can use professionally but sounds fascinating to explore.
Are you being flippant, or is there really a sense in which eigenvectors are relevant to Haskell? To the best of my knowledge despite all the category-theoretical goodness in the language, there's no meaningful language-level connection to linear algebra, -XLinearTypes notwithstanding.
That’s OK. In the same way that when you start to read books, you might like Blyton, Dahl or diving into a Hardy Boys, by the time you’ve been reading fiction for a few decades your tastes might become a bit more philosophical.
The trick is to introduce these things to people when they’re ready for them, and to not treat those who haven’t experienced them as in some way inferior.
I’m not going to shove Proust down someone’s neck or make them feel dumb for not having read any of his work, in the same way I am going to think carefully about whether somebody would benefit from seeing some Prolog.
What does interest me a lot about this list is that it’s not just a “well, look, I found Clojure and think it’s better than Python, YMMV”, or “if you don’t like or understand Haskell maybe you are just too dumb to grok eigenvectors” brag piece.
There is a thought about what you might get from that language that makes it worth exploring. As a result I might revisit OCaml after a brief and shallow flirtation some years ago, and go and take a look at Coq which I doubt I can use professionally but sounds fascinating to explore.