The Little Schemer, a popular book used for Lisp programming shows you how to recursively find the difference between two numbers by subtracting one from each until one of them reaches zero FIRST!).

Well, the preface of that book states:

The goal of this book is to teach the reader to think recursively.

Efficiency is simply irrelevant to the purpose of the mental excercise you complain about. The book does not advertise that algorithm as a way to approach the problem in the real world.

“I don’t think of myself as a Perl Programmer…”

Strange, if you type “Mark Jason Dominus” in the search line at Google you get dozens of links that have “Perl” in the title. The top five hits do not read “C++” or “Pascal” or anything else. Behold, Mark’s latest book, Higher Order Perl is also about Perl. I’m grinning as I write this.

You miss the point entirely. A carpenter is a “carpenter,” not a “hammer-wielder,” even though he wields a hammer a lot of the time.

I think all in all your rant is an exact demonstration of the things Dominus complains about with his article.

If we didn’t have strong advocates, who would we look for when we wanted a good argument?

If we advocated each and every one of our ideas strongly without ever considering the merits of another, would we then have had Newton, Leibniz or Einstein?

And would we have Larry Wall?

Update: see also my response to the update.

Makeshifts last the longest.