lesscode.org

Mark Jason Dominus:

If the Design Patterns movement had been popular in the 1980’s, we wouldn’t even have C++ or Java; we would still be implementing Object-Oriented Classes in C with structs, and the argument would go that since programmers were forced to use C anyway, we should at least help them as much as possible. But the way to provide as much help as possible was not to train people to habitually implement Object-Oriented Classes when necessary; it was to develop languages like C++ and Java that had this pattern built in, so that programmers could concentrate on using OOP style instead of on implementing it.

Update: and an excellent follow-up by Mark addressing a response by Ralph Johnson (one of the Gang of Four).

I wanted to point out an article called Why learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse programmer.

When I found the link in my aggregator, I was expecting the worst, but the title is just gratuitously incendiary. The actual article is thoroughly reasonable. It asserts that learning better languages will make your day job an excercise in demoralization and then asks the question: if you’re a C#/Java developer in the trenches, how do you benefit from your broadened horizons?

There is lots of good discussion in the comments; don’t skip them. What there is not, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, is an easy solution.