Simple is stupid?

I love watching apparently intelligent people make fools of themselves when they decry the loss of a particular branch of complexity that they undoubtedly spend considerable time mastering.

This happens a lot when you're around programmers. Especially really good programmers that love the some times extremely minute particulars that complexity has a habit of opening up for.

They talk about things getting dumbed down so that "the common man" can play along. Hereby implying that they're everything and above said common man.

It's interesting how arrogance and (mathematical/logic) intelligence often make for such good partners. Maybe that's the natural progression and you have to make a special effort to grow empathy and compassion.

I wish more intelligent people would make that effort.

(This observation was inspired by a Danish guy named dave writing about C# in Danish on dot.dave)

I do most certainly agree and must admit to being guilty of that sin a number of times -- won't happen again, I swear :-).

But you have picked an extremly bad example for inspiration here. C# (and java too) is a very long way from being able to replace C or C++. The most annoying thing about your source of inspiration is the lack of capital letters. The author should be shot for that transgression alone.

I care little to nothing about the merits of dot.dave's statements. He may or may not have a point. It was his overly arrogant and self-important mode of expression that stroke a deep discord.

On the case at hand, I believe that One Language To Bind Them All is an illusion. And an uninteresting one at that. Java and C# does have some overlap with C/C++, but all four have their areas of speciality in which they excel. Use them for that.

Java/C# is mostly about business logic and information systems. You wouldn't write an operating system in either. Likewise, I pity the soul trying to do a web-application complete with frontend handling and the likes in C.

Most anything is possible. A much smaller part is reasonable.

Well, even at that I think you got him all wrong. I found his statements to be fair and reasonable.

And by the way: I worked at Architrade for almost 3 years and 90% of our web applications were done in C/C++ - frontend and everything. It was a hassle in some respects and a huge advatage in others.

Seems to me that the admitting of being guilty (with a wellplaced smiley) and thereby indirectly implying that one is particularly intelligent, is what you normally call, a perfomative contradiction in terms. It is equivalent to the claim: "I never repeat myself, I never repeat myself"

In case anyone got confused, this was adressed to Morten Krog.

Well, people with a sense of humor might think that I was implying that I know I have made a fool of my self with my rants about lost complexity, and others might think I was bragging about my intelligence.

Note that there are no smilies here.

The implication being, that if someone misunderstood your comment, it would be due to their lack of humor as opposed to the disability of not being able to express oneself more clearly? Making that assumption somehow verifies my former claim.

As long as we agree, that being arrogant does not imply intelligence with any necessarity - I will not adhere to your comment being vaque. ;)

Interesting information on this blog, thanks