Ladies and gentlemen, here comes the Dunning-Kruger Effect

Criticize a language is not the issue. The real issue is that a lot, I mean a LOT, of developers are in the Mount Stupid. Just because they know very well a language, they think they can criticize other languages for free. The truth is: They don’t know shit.

Douglas Crockford points this issue when he says “Java programmers that don’t want to learn JavaScript, will go to their grave not knowing how miserable they are”. When he says that, he talks about those pretentious developers that don’t even know what a monad or a closure is. This is miserable. This is the Dunning-Kruger Effect in action.

I would really appreciate the critics of any language coming from a guy that practice them for years. So at the end of the day, what matters is: does a critic comes from experience or from some opinionated view forged by the emptiness of a dead mind ?

In the face of this, I would like to say that it is very healthy to listen critics about programming languages because it helps you to understand what is your current level. For example a Scala developer could talk to a Java developer about promises saying “ok, your language is not as good as mine but you could try CompletableFuture to have a taste of what is a monad. Follow me, I will show you what you can do with that”.

Unfortunately, that kind of friendly attitude is very rare these days.