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cb321today at 11:28 AM0 repliesview on HN

This may seem like a modern conflict, but what I like about your post is its more general human cognitive orientation. Since to each new generation everything is new, people tend to forget that this kind of tension goes back to the dawn of programming with Fortran and Lisp, or even earlier if you count various notations for math.

FWIW, CPUs/hardware structurally do not have quite as much luxury for dynamism/monotyped things. So, all this does connect with how tight/abstract a bridge to the hardware world one cares about (which just varies). That naturally connects to performance, but that also becomes tricky once one moves to pragmatic problem decomposition over purity (e.g. NOT "pure" Python or "pure" Ruby). In my experience, people tend to overvalue purity as much as they tend to over-simplify. :-)