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Geeze... the contemporary Internet, man. Ten years ago, we flamed each other over our personal preferences, and others' views were "stupid". Today, we flame on about our personal preferences, and others are implied to be "immoral". Both exercises are admittedly immature, but at the least the former was more cheeky and not so up its own posterior.

Yes, tooling is a huge deal in day-to-day life. When I think about drains on my time and productivity, I've never been too setback by having to deal with a "for" loop instead of something more monadic. However, I HAVE spent days doing painful refactoring work, that could have been done in minutes with a few right-clicks in an IDE. Build tools and CI/CD pipelines, profiling and troubleshooting tools, etc etc etc.

I can't believe that any of this stuff requires defending oneself from having "sold out to The Man".




> When I think about drains on my time and productivity, I've never been too setback by having to deal with a "for" loop instead of something more monadic. However, I HAVE spent days doing painful refactoring work, that could have been done in minutes with a few right-clicks in an IDE.

I think your examples betray your inexperience with what you're criticizing. A for loop isn't somehow corresponding to "something monadic" and safe refactoring (actual refactoring, not just renaming things, though that's obviously trivial as well) is extremely easy to do and produces great results in languages like Haskell, OCaml, etc.. Primarily this is because moving grouped things is nowhere near as sensitive as in a language like Java or the like.

But yeah, you can right-click rename all day, for sure... Never mind that other languages can let you safely re-architect the very bones of the solution with almost zero fear of coming out on the other side in failure.

Java has great tools, but let's not bring up refactoring as a real strength. It's kid's level stuff in comparison to languages that allow you to do that and more without tooling.

Haskell et al. have crap tooling and that has real consequences, but refactoring isn't one of the casualties at all. They're still better at refactoring, re-architecting and repurposing than any of the big name languages.

At least bring up debugging, system interaction or something.




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