Why do programmers put up with so much pain?

If you're using a less popular language, it may seem like there is a ton of pain there. But there's pain everywhere. Every stack has its own problems. The key is you need to pick the pain you want to live with.

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Transcript

Why do programmers put up with so much pain? By the end of this episode, I hope to explore this idea a little bit more. This won't be one where I have some definitive answer, some definition. This is more just me pontificating. My name is Eric Normand and I help people thrive with functional programming.

I'm bringing this up because a kind listener who's new to programming, certainly new to functional programming, he was watching a talk about the pain of using Haskell for a business. Now, every language has some pain, but this one was particular to the Haskell language because he was interested in Haskell.

He was asking me why someone would go with Haskell as opposed to going up with one of the more established languages when they're building a business. Then he mentioned a few languages, like why not go with Java and Spring? Why not use ASP.NET?

I thought this was an interesting idea to explore. Let's go over some facts.

Fact number one is programmers put up with a lot of pain. They really do. There's quite a lot of pain in every stack. In every language, there is pain. There's no getting around that.

Even if it is I have to read a book this thick and be certified in Spring to be able to do it, or I have to be like a pioneer [laughs] and figure out how to get this stuff working, which is available in Spring, but I need to get it to work in Haskell.

All of that is pain and programmers deal with that. It's everywhere. That's fact number two. Programmers deal with it and it's everywhere. The resolution to this question, I'm not going to say it's an answer, but the resolution is it's about picking your pain.

Just as a personal example, I have used a little bit of Spring. In my experience, a lot of it was figuring out which XML file to edit, editing it; that was what you did most of the time for solving problems. That was painful to me.

It was painful that I just wanted to do something very simple like something that I thought I should be able to do with just an if statement. I just want to either do this in this case or do that every other case, just a very simple thing. Of course that required setting up a new plugin and that required adding a line to an XML file and then configuring that with more XML.

Видео Why do programmers put up with so much pain? канала Eric Normand