Clojure is not Software Conservative

Maybe a political conservative would have been able to construct the argument in a way that would make developers proud to label themselves programing conservatives.

But I am a political conservative! Maybe a political conservative with more impressive rhetorical skills would have done better...

But wait, that doesn't make sense because this supposedly has nothing at all to do with political points of view.

Let's ignore political extremists for the moment.

I think the definitions of political conservative on Steve Yegge's post are pretty far wrong. If those are the commonly held beliefs among the liberal side, well, that seems like a stunning level of misunderstanding.

I think the only thing colloquially conservative about "conservatives" is that they are colloquially conservative in the amount of power the wish to cede to government.

Being a political conservative today in the US, in an ideal case at least, is about freedom and choice. Generally held beliefs are that free-markets are good in many cases, too much regulation is as bad and sometimes worse than too little, and that government is in very many cases a terribly inefficient use of resources.

In principle they do not believe in domination of the masses by a vast corpus of rigid rules. They believe a minimal set of overarching rules, and leaving much to freedom and choice.

That's conservatism in principle, from my view as a conservative. The reality of course is different, particularly for "conservatives" in office or seeking office. I personally have a hard time distinguishing one brand of politician from another.

And there are a vast array of people with sometimes bizarre beliefs that associate with one side or the other of the political spectrum, and the conservative side has plenty of them, and liberals do too.

I don't know for sure how this 'brand' of conservatism would apply to programming. I would suggest though, they would want as much freedom to express themselves as they could get.

So:

--The idea of strong typing would rub conservatives the wrong way.

--A rigid and inviolable set of rules and procedures and processes for how code may be written.

I'm not sure what else. My programming experience is pretty amateur. My favorite languages to work in are C, Python, and Clojure. So maybe that says something.

These people try to debunk Yegge's idea by proving, point by point, how their language isn't conservative. But no matter how much counter-arguments and rational fodder they provide, it doesn't change a bit anywhere because what Yegge offers is a perception, viewpoint, an idea, a gut feeling of his with some semirandom examples for the sake of examples. And you can't attack someone else's idea or perception with rational weapons.

What matters is how well Yegge's idea strikes the chord here. "But it's an oversimplification!" Of course it is but that's not the point here. The point is Yegge thinks he recognized the same driving energy between the political conservatives and conservative programmers, and similarly to liberal ones. The mindset, the kind. What's interesting is if that rings true and if so, how well it rings true.

Basically, he seems quite right, give or take a bad example or two. There are these two opposing mindsets in the field of programming whose clashes are well-known to everyone and the conservative--liberal axis quite nicely divides the camps. It overlaps a lot with the static vs. dynamic typing war but like he said, the typing wars are basically a special case of conservative vs liberal.

I can certainly recognize these daring sword-swingers and the patient fortress-builders of the programming league.

With a little Lisp, incl. two JavaCL attempts: http://jfli.sf.net & http://foil.sf.net