My comment was reflecting my intuition that most programmers would not find the blog post useful or insightful.
The first two sentences of the blog post are, "I wonder why we have separate arrays and hashes in Perl. Other languages don't do it." However, as evidenced by only 4 contrary languages listed in the comments here, the vast majority of programming languages have separate array and hash structures.
Much of the post is absolutely trivial. The post is a combination of circular reasoning (arrays and hashes must be different because they... are different) and some sort of straw man gedanken (well it would be easy to do if we did this but then that doesn't work, so obviously this way's "thought out").
It's a whole post to point out that arrays and hashes are different and are used differently. Hurray? Let's upvote it?
I see what you mean, in that it could definitely have been a lot shorter and to the point. But it was satire, especially those first two sentences, to point out how silly he thinks it is to combine them. I think you may be taking it a tad too seriously.
I don't think it means there are less programmers on HN, rather I think it reflects the drop in the programming skill of the average user as HN has grown.
The first two sentences of the blog post are, "I wonder why we have separate arrays and hashes in Perl. Other languages don't do it." However, as evidenced by only 4 contrary languages listed in the comments here, the vast majority of programming languages have separate array and hash structures.
Much of the post is absolutely trivial. The post is a combination of circular reasoning (arrays and hashes must be different because they... are different) and some sort of straw man gedanken (well it would be easy to do if we did this but then that doesn't work, so obviously this way's "thought out").
It's a whole post to point out that arrays and hashes are different and are used differently. Hurray? Let's upvote it?