It doesn't move the needle

It doesn’t move the needle Note: An LLM was not used in writing this article. In a tweet (before Musk bought it and everyone left), during Covid, I wrote (which was quoted in a talk called “Stop Writing Dead Programs” by Jack Rusher): Becoming more and more aware that languages in the ML tradition (Haskell, Rust, OCaml, etc) are about a certain kind of linguistic game that the developers have fun playing, and not because it makes any software arrive quicker, behave righter, perform better, or last longer. I thought I’d expand on that a little bit more. Techniques, methodologies and technologies can become something that people get attached to, and, as I wrote in 2023, can become a bit of a crutch: It seems to apply strongly to formal languages (XML, Nix, Terraform, Kubernetes YAML), some architectures (microservices, the cloud, SPAs, MPAs, OO, containers), and type systems (dependent types, effect systems, the borrow checker), and methodologies (devops, scrum, open source). [2026…