I know exactly how he feels. This is basically the experience I had when I moved from Python to functional languages and it finally "clicked" how much more productive I could be in a Lisp or an ML.
Where I differ somewhat is that for me, it saved programming as I knew it. I wouldn't be a programmer right now if it weren't for discovering Lisps and MLs.
I fecking hated writing spaghetti OOP and tedious imperative loops. Mainstream programming languages are built on the lowest common denominator and the result is that as a younger person looking at the possibility of getting into computers as a career, I was scared off by the amount of willful tedium that seemed to define professional coding at the time.
Today I work in a Clojure shop, and if I didn't, I'd be very wary of looking for employers that expected me to use inferior tools simply because they did not understand more efficient functional ones.
It reminds me of some of the terrible kitchens I used to work at where I'd be expected to do things like cut meat with a cheap paring knife because the employer felt that a real chef's knife was "unnecessary" or "too expensive". I quit those jobs, and frankly, I wonder at programmers who don't have the same respect for their craft when it comes to programming tools.
Where I differ somewhat is that for me, it saved programming as I knew it. I wouldn't be a programmer right now if it weren't for discovering Lisps and MLs.
I fecking hated writing spaghetti OOP and tedious imperative loops. Mainstream programming languages are built on the lowest common denominator and the result is that as a younger person looking at the possibility of getting into computers as a career, I was scared off by the amount of willful tedium that seemed to define professional coding at the time.
Today I work in a Clojure shop, and if I didn't, I'd be very wary of looking for employers that expected me to use inferior tools simply because they did not understand more efficient functional ones.
It reminds me of some of the terrible kitchens I used to work at where I'd be expected to do things like cut meat with a cheap paring knife because the employer felt that a real chef's knife was "unnecessary" or "too expensive". I quit those jobs, and frankly, I wonder at programmers who don't have the same respect for their craft when it comes to programming tools.