I think there are several different axes one can split programmer culture down (which may or may not be orthogonal).
Brian Beckman explained one such axis, as an aside, in "Don't fear the Monad" [1], about two differing views that born in the '70s and split two programmers into two camps:
The bottom-up people, and the top-down people:
- The bottom-up people start with the hardware and only add abstractions and trade performance where necessary (fortran, c, java)
- The top-down people started with perfect abstraction/logic and reduced/removed abstraction to get access to the hardware and performance where necessary (lisp, ml, haskell)
What is interesting these days, is that these two camps are trying to steal more and more ideas from each other [2]
Brian Beckman explained one such axis, as an aside, in "Don't fear the Monad" [1], about two differing views that born in the '70s and split two programmers into two camps:
The bottom-up people, and the top-down people:
- The bottom-up people start with the hardware and only add abstractions and trade performance where necessary (fortran, c, java)
- The top-down people started with perfect abstraction/logic and reduced/removed abstraction to get access to the hardware and performance where necessary (lisp, ml, haskell)
What is interesting these days, is that these two camps are trying to steal more and more ideas from each other [2]
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhuHCtR3xq8
[2] http://i.imgur.com/ugnuti0.png
(previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024483 )