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Pardon my French, but this is one of the most idiotic things I have read in a long time. - author starts with saying he's a beginner. But somehow, this gives h
by roel_v 11y ago
Pardon my French, but this is one of the most idiotic things I have read in a long time.
- author starts with saying he's a beginner. But somehow, this gives him better insights than others, because 'fresh pair of eyes', and 'resistance to new things'
- then he says (about the industry in general) 'To me it seems really slow to adopt new concepts.' (wtf?)
- except then he says 'Programmers should really take a leaf from the Mathematics & Sciences'. Because they move faster than programming, he must mean? To paraphrase Babbage badly - 'I am unable to comprehend the sort of confusion that could lead to such a statement'.
- then he says that the 'the primary source of innovation in the it industry is from open source projects'. (yeah, sorry to be that guy, but imma need to put some 'citation needed' on that one)
- and then, somehow, this leads to a justification on why he wants to learn about some javascript framework (because of course - 'learning' as a programmer is about getting used to the idiosyncrasies of the umpteenth 'framework' that does the exact same thing as the other ones before it, except in a way that is shitty in another way. O excuse me, 'having it under your belt'.)
- but of course, if experienced people call out the futility of it, they are idiots! Because he started off this whole thing with 'I’ve experienced a strange culture of the better a programmer becomes at a subject the less they feel the need to learn.'!) So ignore people who've been there because they're just old geezers who don't know anything anyway!
What ticked me off enough to waste 10 minutes of my life on writing the above, was the claim that software should be more like proper engineering and science - and then going on to claim that the way to do this is by jumping from one navel-gazing fad framework to the next even faster! Lol this attitude would be laughed out of a proper engineering firm so fast it wouldn't have time to take its jacket off.
And of course, everybody is free to post whatever they want on the internet, so why do I care; but cultish nonsense like this does actually harm newcomers who think it somehow represents truth, and who might waste years of their career on chasing technical details while in the mean time neglecting (or not even realizing the existence of) what truly matters for progression as a software engineer: the bigger picture within the business, evergreen CS fundamentals, complementary technology, etc.
Now if you'll excuse me, my local senior center's workshop 'Dealing with age-induced grumpiness: an introduction for those who see 40 looming!' starts in half an hour...
- cmdkeen 11y ago"Evergreen CS fundamentals" is absolutely key. I've had a rant brewing for a while now that this article exemplifies. A newcomer who has picked up Javascript cannot seriously want programming to be much more like maths / sciences, or even more like a profession. Simply because they all place massive barriers to new entrants that require years of (often postgraduate) studies. Learning some interesting data structures, how Javascript works under the hood, enjoying the fun of null pointer exceptions, understanding relational databases and maybe some lambda calculus. Those things make you a better developer and have the added advantage of helping you understand the next fad that comes along. The article points out that more experienced developers often seem disinterested in learning new things. I'd covert that to being much more aware of what "new" actually means. A "new" Javascript thing fundamentally can't do anything different from another Javascript thing, it might do it more verbosely or abstract away some really funky code. A more experienced dev should consider being interested by things like V8, server and client side Javascript, Typescript / ES6 because they offer more fundamental change.
- codefreeze 11y agoI must also be one of those suffering from age-induced grumpiness as I agreed with everything you just said. It was a very confused article indeed!
- cmdv 11y agoHi, I'm the author. I think you've done a lot of reading between the lines. The intention of the article was to get people inspired to try experiment and explore new things. I did say I was painting with a wide brush. That doesn't excuse some inaccuracies you don't agree with. I'm not a grad student or a young whipper snapper, being closer to 40 than my 30's. These are only observation I've experienced so far and appreciate your view on the mater. I've also been learning Haskell so I am interested in the whole FP paradigm, so though I've only been do JS so far would really like learn other languages. Maybe my experiences so far aren't what most people experience coming into programming. I'm sure what ever I say won't make a slight difference but wanted to clarify a few points. Happy Hacking
- mikekchar 11y ago