Comment by CPLX
2 days ago
I know that HN is famously a discussion forum where users comment based on the titles of submitted articles, rather than their content.
With that said, the divergence in comments on this very insightful and well written article will soon provide an unusually clear means of determining who is commenting on the title and who is commenting on the article.
The omission of quotations in the title triggered my Lisp-damaged brain to man the walls, only to immediately be met with Ruby and Scheme examples. False alarm.
That's fair. It's also the case that to some extent HN's article titles serve the same purpose as that one line description in a speed dating event. They're ice breakers, everybody has the same prompt and then writes about that, and even if they did read the article which I agree often they don't, they come at it from a different angle.
I feel similarly to the article author, it is trivially true that we could express anything in all the general purpose languages, that's what general purpose even means, but I find for Computer Languages the Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis checks out pretty well. The language changes how you think about the problem.
As a long-time HN contributor, I believe in visualizing myself like water flowing downhill. As such, I certainly would never try to overturn the prevailing culture of commenting on article titles and in fact engaging in it myself from time to time.