Again, how he gets this from Amanda’s and my presentation is beyond
me
Yes, I don't doubt it is beyond him. Yet he is one of only two very smart people with very interesting things to say that managed to get themselves removed from my various feeds, because I just couldn't stand their idolatry of static-typing and never ending condescension of anything remotely critical of it anymore.
I haven't seen the presentation, but I don't for a second doubt they implied that:
If somebody stays away from typed languages, it [means]
they’re stupid, or lack education, or are afraid of maths. There
are [no] valid practical reasons for staying away [from type
languages].
He believes they were being very constructive, showing an understanding for other opinions and taking a nuanced view of static typing, with an eye for valid criticisms. I know, from the online reviews, many did not experience the talk that way.
Reading this debate has been an exercise in sifting valuable commentary from a bunch of opinionated drivel, on both sides. In particular, the current article suffers from the author assuming that every single comment is addressed to his presentation, despite it getting a very brief mention near the beginning. The 'seven deadly sins' article had a better tone, but still spent most of its time on non sequiturs and anti-intellectual cheap shots.
I'm quite interested in type systems (and the lack thereof) but the level of debate around them is astonishingly poor.
It's also odd because Kell only specifically accuses the Snively/Laucher talk of committing two of the "seven deadly sins", and that isn't one of the two.
I think he took Stephen Kell's post as a direct response to their talk when in fact Stephen Kell's post was about the entire culture around static typing and their talk is only one small piece of it.
Yes, and the interesting thing is to me this exactly demonstrates the problem that is being pointed out by Kell (for the community in general) and by me (for Snively in particular).
What I feel this blog post demonstrates is that if you are somewhat critical of something Snively says, you are met with a barrage of arguments that counters everything you said in all the ways he could possibly find to disagree with them. That motivation will always lead to some ridiculous and only remotely relevant disagreements, which are now being pointed out here and over on Reddit.
This blog post feels like it was written in anger: the enemy must not just be refuted on some points: he must be destroyed. His credibility must be tarnished by showing he didn't get anything right.
I think I understand this, because I used to do this. I stopped because I wondered why I was so often getting into ridiculous, irrelevant, arguments about things that I didn't even care about but that just came up in a discussion. Proving the other wrong in any way became more important than finding an answer to the question before us.
I've been guilty of this too. The funny thing is, if you actually want to win an argument that's exactly what you shouldn't do. If you respond to everything the other person said, and refute each of this points, then inevitably somebody will come along and take one of your refutations of an unimportant issue and point out a factual error in your refutation. Even if you are 100% correct, somebody will come along and misinterpret one of your sentences. At this point you've lost the debate, because now the entire debate is focused on that small point that you got wrong, and it can be difficult to steer it away from that onto the more important issues.
No, if you want to win an argument you should do exactly the opposite. You should find one weakness in your opponent's argument, and then make a bulletproof refutation of that. You may think that because he made other points that are wrong it's better to point out all the ways in which he is wrong, but that's a bad strategy. Inevitably you will be wrong or misinterpretable in one of your many refutations and then you've lost.
Both of these strategies are of course detrimental to having a productive debate ;-)
I'm not sure that there are any opposing views here. I think that once you filter out the actual arguments, they are mostly independent of each other. Which opposing views did you take away from these two blog posts?
Curry-Howard is central to how you think about programming vs. Curry-Howard is almost completely irrelevant to how you program?
But maybe that disagreement goes away if I restate it slightly: Curry-Howard is central to how you think about programming vs. Curry-Howard is almost completely irrelevant to how you actually write programs. That is, if I am actually in the process of writing a program, I don't think about Curry-Howard very much, even if I'm working with the type system in Haskell. If I think about programming at a highly abstract level, then, OK, Curry-Howard might be considered a central insight.
I haven't seen the presentation, but I don't for a second doubt they implied that:
He believes they were being very constructive, showing an understanding for other opinions and taking a nuanced view of static typing, with an eye for valid criticisms. I know, from the online reviews, many did not experience the talk that way.