[covidacct]

This talk is an amusing aside. I think the other posters are bit harsh for a talk that's clearly meant to be taken in that way.

If you're interested in actual psychology of programming languages, there is a small but growing research community at the intersection of programming languages and software engineering. The focus is mostly on usability research a la human-computer interaction, but there's also work on community psychology, etc. applies to programming languages and software engineering. See, for example, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7503516

[wwatson]

Psychology vs psychoanalysis is addressed more in the paper:

"Psychoanalyst’s Rhetorical Question

Psychoanalysis can take a pragmatic stance when compared with other stances concerning the ontological status of the mind. A key question psychoanalysis addresses is the reality of the causes and effects of the subconscious. A provocative question here would be: ‘ Is sexual trauma completely free, or must it be compensated for?’ One form of compensation would be what psychoanalysis calls ‘the talking cure’. The implicit argument here is that the unconscious is real if it has real consequences. Computer scientists are concerned with the mind only in so far that it can be modeled, hence the question: ‘ Can the target pass the Turing test?’. Cognitive scientists are preoccupied with the scientific aspect of the mind to the point that the most relevant question to the others in the debate is: ‘Can you repeat your findings?’ Economists, are like the cognitive scientists in that they want repeatable findings but they also want to allow for agents to adjust to their environment including the fact that they are being measured. This means that economists and game theorists pose the question: ‘Can you create a strategy?’, where strategy is defined as those decisions that take other people's decisions into account. Finally, philosophers are preoccupied with the ontological status of the mind itself, and therefore ask the question: ‘C an you locate first person experience?”, while the closely related cultural theorists are more concerned with: ‘Can you create or critique an ideology?’" https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/vulk-blog/ThePervertsGuid...

[joe_the_user]

Well, various parts are taken amusingly but I think this is aiming to be a serious inquiry into the psychology of programming language choice, which a bit different from the psychology of actually programming. Language choice is much wrapped up with power and ideology, areas that Zizek etc focus on strongly.

[DonHopkins]

And letting go of a programming language that you fell in love with, who was ripped away from you or died for whatever reason, can be an emotionally difficult experience. Then there's that period where you're not ready to learn a new programming language, because you don't want to dishonor the memory of the lost language you're still mourning for.

At the end of the talk, he mentioned that Paul Graham writes poetically about Romantic Languages, and classifies Lisp and Scheme as Melancholy Languages, but he would also classify Lisp as a Hysteric Language, and COBOL is a Depression Language. ;O

From the paper:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/vulk-blog/ThePervertsGuid...

Other Categories of Enjoyment: Based on the subject's relationship with the object of desire, there are various other categories of enjoyment that can be applied to languages. Depression within Lacanian psychoanalysis can be described as the stopping up of circulation around the object of desire. With depression, the object is lost and enjoyment is retrieved from the reminiscing of the loss. With melancholy the very memory of the object is lost (a loss of a loss) so the enjoyment comes from the romantic attitude with respect to the history of the language.

[dleslie]

My feelings for Turbo Pascal are not unlike my feelings for the first ex who I truly cared about. It's hard to let go of that first love.