[alpeb]

The Blub Paradox argument basically states that you must use the most powerful language because it's the only one that'll let you have a broader perspective to judge all the other programming languages. Ironically, this kind of perspective is very narrow itself. You gotta consider the ultimate goal of writing software is to generate solutions that successfully solve users' problems. For complex problems that require lots of people working together, usually the effectiveness of that collaboration is the hardest of all problems, well above the technical problems. Most of all modern programming languages can solve all the problems, in different ways. So the criteria for selecting a language is not power, but how it facilitates existing and new members of a team to make progress.

[threatofrain]

I agree with your framing that the collaboration aspects of large projects are probably harder than the technical aspects.

However, I think there are still lingering questions about whether the "power" of a language has noteworthy interaction with the difficulties of collaboration. For example, some might argue that the guard rails put up by FP languages allows them to reason better about interaction with colleagues' code. Talking to colleagues about code interaction is a human collaboration problem too.

If that's the case, then part of choosing a programming language is also in service to mitigating the difficulties of collaboration.

[RSZC]

Conversely, though, if moving to a higher level language / paradigm makes you more productive, you may not need so many people in the first place.

Modern-day parallel would probably be WhatsApp, with Erlang taking the place of Lisp.

[gatestone]

The mentioned paradox is simply not true. How would being fluent in Haskell make you appreciate the need for assembler programming in, say, math opitimizations in Go crypto packages, or any low level stuff?

[threatofrain]

I would like to hear this claim with more specificity, like if the claim is that learning Clojure will help you predict how the language atoms of Go might lead to some structures, or more narrowly that if Clojure has more supported concurrency models, then it helps you judge Go vs Elixir from a concurrency perspective, or if learning a multi-paradigm language helps you judge a language with a paradigm focus.