“I find it hilarious when people think of Pascal as some old, slow, useless language that would be a terrible choice for anything, yet still think of C as a realistic language to choose for development today.”
“ We want so badly to believe that the language/OS situation today is based to a large degree on some contest of technical merit, but from my experience, it’s mostly an accident of social dynamics.”
https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1393#comment-18610 (hat tip + references at https://twitter.com/wallingf/status/911962530918084608)
Obligatory Duncan Watts reference: from a review of his “Everything is Obvious” in NYT: https://nyti.ms/2jXp2mx
“We think the Mona Lisa is famous because of its traits, but we think those traits are significant only because they belong to the Mona Lisa, which we know to be famous.”
This kind of circular logic is as hyperfine and subtle as it is endemic and destructive. When asked to describe *why* anything, you just describe *it* and make (vacuous) intellectual leap from there to “why”.
Here’s a tidbit from Duncan Watts’ “Everything is obvious: once you know the answer” showing what this looks like in the wild, with a real review of Harry Potter:
‘Although it is rarely presented as such, this kind of circular reasoning—X succeeded because X had the attributes of X—pervades commonsense explanations for why some things succeed and others fail. For example, an article on the success of the Harry Potter books explained it this way: …’
