[comma_at]

> Good programming practice isn't a language feature its a programmer feature.

I'll enjoy reading your production-grade brainfuck code.

A language's built-ins and idioms greatly influence what you say and how you say it. If your mother tongue doesn't have words to describe any emotions you'll have a hard time explaining them. You're talking only about the other side of the coin. Yes, people can write terrible clojure code, you need to be a good programmer to write good code. But please consider rewriting this bash one-liner in pure C (or assembly)

    grep FOO */* | wc -l

Having a language to express your domain concisely is essential in reducing code complexity, time-to-market, bugs etc.

[smackeyacky]

Do you really think referencing brainfuck, a deliberately difficult language, is the right way to get your point across?

[capableweb]

> > > Good programming practice isn't a language feature its a programmer feature.

> > I'll enjoy reading your production-grade brainfuck code.

> Do you really think referencing brainfuck, a deliberately difficult language, is the right way to get your point across?

I'm gonna assume you're not deliberately missing the point here and the confusion is genuine.

You were initially indirectly saying that "it doesn't matter what language you use, how the program ends up is 100% to the developer"

The other person made a joke/insight about that, since you think so, you should be able to write a program ready for production in Brainfuck, since your point was that the language doesn't matter.

Obviously, anything but Brainfuck would make it easier to both write and understand, therefore your point seems to not be 100% true, at least always.

The main point is not about Brainfuck, it's just an example. The point is about that the programming language _does_ matter, as well as the skill of the developer.

[smackeyacky]

Brainfuck is not an example, its a strawman. If it was meant to be a joke, it sucks.

I really don't understand the automatic genuflection that lisp/forth/smalltalk get on HN. You can't make a bad programmer better by switching out the language.

I am guessing HN skews younger and never had to build boring production systems in these failures (note: my professional experience was years of fighting smalltalk).

For the vast majority of programming tasks, boring old java or c# or python have enough language features of the holy trinity now that smugly announcing to the world you are a clojure exclusive geek is a huge red flag.

[kazinator]

> You can't make a bad programmer better by switching out the language

Right; good programmer, though, another story.

> boring old java or c# or python

Many programmers using these were switched to them from something else, and in many cases are doing better work because of that.

[smackeyacky]

If they moved on from lisp I'm 100% sure they are now able to do better work, largely because they no longer have to spend their days telling everybody they are a lisp programmer.