I don't understand this comment. I'm a programmer, designing a language in my spare time, and I found it interesting, since I considered going the Lua/PHP route with my collections. I thought it was nice to find an article about actual programming an HN again, and I don't know why non-programmers would upvote it.
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.
Quite. The whole point (haha) of an array is that you take a pointer to its first item + (the size of each item * the index number) and get a pointer to the item you want, which is bloody quick. No hashtable can compete with that - a hash is a compromise for when you can't use an int for whatever reason.
