46 ms·
Why I don't write about programming and why it's not really worthwhile to do so
- greenlblue 17y agoNice article and the lessons apply to mathematicians as well. Few mathematician are willing to engage in civil meta-mathematical discourse and usually all such discussions end up in a shouting match about the intellectual inferiority of whoever is involved.
- whyenot 17y agoYes. I've found it very intimidating as a grad student. I wonder though if it's really worse in math, or if most academic disciplines don't have the same problem.
- greenlblue 17y agoIt's much worse in math because mathematicians are an argumentative bunch to begin with and many novice mathematicians have their entire being built around their intellectual abilities so they get quite defensive when their views are challenged.
- Scriptor 17y agoI'd say it's not worthwhile to write about programming if people already have high expectations for you. Spolsky is definitely well-known and some people probably view him as somewhat full of himself, so they like to pick out anything that might hurt his image. For the average joe schmoe programmer, people don't have such expectations, so there is far less negative reaction. Also, personality does play a huge role. Someone who doesn't seem too aloof and distant from other people will be better off (take _why for example).
- mattmanser 17y agolol, even this is an attack on Joel! "full of himself", "aloof and distant", "For the average joe schmoe programmer (implying only they can appreciate his work)"
- Scriptor 17y agoI was trying to describe how people who attack him think of him. Also, by "average joe schmoe" I meant someone who, among other things, hasn't published an entire book.
- access_denied 17y agoScriptor, you were misunderstood, I can clearly see that. But something else is interresting here. You seemed to attack someone who is respected in the programming community, as a result the 'defender' gets many upvotes. I would like to now, why people feel compelled to 'defend' the respected guys. Is this cultish?
- petercooper 17y agoSomeone who doesn't seem to aloof and distant from other people will be better off (take _why for example). _why isn't the best example - he was awesome, but part of his appeal was that he was distant and not on the same plane as the rest of us.. just not in a negative way. Nonetheless, before he disappeared he tweeted: programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more. Even though he didn't attract much negativity due to his whimsical, impenetrable persona, it didn't seem to help him feel much better about his excellent work.
- amackera 17y agoThis is something that has bothered me a lot in the past. Other engineers build bridges and towers and monuments that stand for years and years. The beautiful code written by a good programmer might be replaced 8 months later by a junior who doesn't understand it. I suppose in our profession we are able to perpetuate ourselves by communicating our ideas into the world. Our influence is felt in posterity through the inspiration of thought in our successors. The kernel may evolve over time, but its evolution may be guided by the initial conditions of its initial code base (and subsequent changes). A civil engineer may be directly remembered by the the bridge that bears his or her name; a software engineer may be indirectly remembered by the smart code he or she has written.
- aristus 17y agoComparing a Rails library to a bridge isn't quite right. Most things lone hackers write are bike sheds and family homes. No one builds a bridge alone. You want a legacy? Move up the food chain and start discovering new data structures and algorithms. Or work on a large project like GMail.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- rapind 17y agoWhat I love about that comment by _why is that in my own experience the code I'm least proud of lives on and on and on... Someone please replace it.
- jrockway 17y agoIt's worth noting that Spolsky writes about programmers, not programming. Everything he says is opinion, and as a result, it tends to spawn a lot of critical comments. ("Your employer hates you if you don't have an Aeron chair." Maybe, maybe not.) Writing about programming -- techniques, thought processes, libraries, and code -- is highly valuable, at least in my opinion.
- blubb 17y agoHe's actually written quite a bit about programming, but over the years he's (naturally) shifted to writing more about the business of software development and how to run a software business. He's clearly opinionated, but his opinions are still valuable.
- jrockway 17y agoWhen he writes about programming, he tends to be wrong. His thoughts on "leaky abstraction" and "architecture astronauts" are ... wrong.
- cookiecaper 17y agoMost of the generic pontificating I find on the run-of-the-mill programming blog just seems like a marketing ploy to me. I worked with a guy who updates his blog almost every day, sometimes more than once, and always syndicates it onto Facebook, but it's all for marketing, and it's really annoying, because the post basically just boils down to "X is cool, here are a few paragraphs about what I like about it, I can implement it for your business!" On the other hand, posts that are informed by real-world experience and stories that discuss specific implementations are almost always at least somewhat interesting. This is what Joel came up on; he became well-known because his blog detailed hiring practices and how they've worked out for his company, certain strategies and fallacies at Juno, Microsoft, and Fog Creek, and the outcomes of them, and informed analyses of progress at the institutions wherein he has specific knowledge (primarily Fog Creek, I reckon). Joel's posts were interesting because he had a lot of stories and a lot of anecdotes to back them up. His blog doesn't simply say, "I think if you give programmers offices with good equipment you'll end with some pretty good programmers", but "I thought if you gave programmers offices and good equipment you'd get good programmers, so here at Fog Creek we do that. Here are some pictures. When I was at Microsoft, everyone was sad because middle-management got the glory and the offices. At Fog Creek, we focus on our programmers, and it greatly increases our productivity, morale, etc.". One of these is much more interesting.
- jackfoxy 17y agoAlthough my evidence is only anecdotal, it seems like a lot of the programmers who are constantly argumentative and the biggest flamers are loners who in some cases have never even worked in a team environment.
- neilc 17y agoI think another reason for this behavior is that programmers often define their identity in terms of their preferred tools (you're a "Perl programmer", not merely a "programmer"). That means that any perceived slight against a programmer's preferred tool must be aggressively defended -- hence the abundance of religious arguments about "$X is better than your favorite language."
- theBobMcCormick 17y agoI think there's a very similar dynamic at work in politics, where people self-identify as a particular party or supporter of a particular ideology, an then take any criticism, however mild" of that party or ideology as a personal attack upon their very identity.
- kalid 17y agoYes, I think this unfortunate tribal protection trait is built into human nature. In the past it may have helped, but we end up forming (and violently 'defending') tribes around random things. It seems religion, sports, politics, etc. play on this instinct.
- michaelfairley 17y agopg has an essay about this very idea: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
- theBobMcCormick 17y agoAh, I should have realized. PG is da man.
- WalterBright 17y agoDoesn't that just come with the territory? If you're successful with your opinions, people will argue with you.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- NathanKP 17y agoI have to agree with the writers estimation of the programming audience. I have noticed a very similar negative trend even among HN users, with comments on my programming themed blog tending to be generally positive with a few negative replies, while comments on HN on the same articles tend to be generally negative with a few positive replies. We programmers probably tend to nitpick a bit more than your average audience, and that isn't always a bad thing. It can't be all that encouraging to the writers though.
- gamble 17y agoI think it's just the size of the audience drawn in by a social news site. HN was an uncommonly polite place when it was first launched and largely populated by people with links to YC. I'd guess the vast majority were programmers or tech startup business types at that point. As HN grew, it regressed toward the mean. It still has a more respectful and intelligent community than reddit, for example, but there's a more reddit-like tendency to attack than there was in the early days. My theory is that there's a non-linear relationship between community size and disrespect. Small online communities can maintain a respectful tone, but once disrespect creeps in it tends to provoke a similar response, and a vicious circle is created. The larger the community, the harder it is to suppress those kernels of disrespect.
- rapind 17y agoSure. The presence of consequences. You can apply the same theory to physical community sizes. If you're going to run into the same guy every day, there's motivation to get along.
- hernan7 17y agoI don't know about "average audiences", but some music-related sites that I read now&then have quite a bit of negativity. Not to mention political discussion sites...
- mpk 17y agoAs far as I'm concerned this is just another piece of opinion put online by a programmer. That's not a bad thing - putting things out there and talking about them is integral to the programming profession as a whole. Look at the body of writing work out there written by programmers that's considered 'classic' already. Never mind that most of the discussion is usually subjective, highly opinionated, often misinformed and abrasive, insulting or abusive. Anything that is out there for the public to comment on is subjected to this. Just take that as a given, this is what you get when you make public comments. People not being nice on the internet is just a fact of life. That doesn't immediately devalue what you're saying. There are plenty of people out there who don't read or write commentary and read postings on their merit. Not writing in public just because people might say nasty things about you or your writings seems wrong to me. Also, VI rocks! Down with Emacs! Yeah! Screw your non-modal editors!
- toothcomb 17y agoWhy do people comment? Perhaps it's because they can. People can say what they like. But I still have to filter it. And that wastes my time. I like threads and tree like comments as it can be interesting to see the ideas and feedback at play. But sometimes I think it would be far better if the comments remained completely on topic. The problem is good jeurnalism is inherently difficult. I resist writing blog posts because I'd spend too long on a post. As a teacher I'd spend a day at least on a hand out. And a post requires listening to feedback and fine tuning it. That's great if you have an informed receptive audience. If I do ever bother with a blog, I think I'd ask for my desired feedback. I'd like users to submit links to relavant associated content. I do enjoy a 'good' article about programming, I specifically like to hear about people's mistakes.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 17y agoI disagree. Although my blog is currently down (software issues that I have put off fixing for wayyy too long), I am going to continue to write about programming. Something that really annoys me is how many programmers don't know how to program. Sitting around on social news sites telling everyone how dumb they are doesn't fix the problem, but teaching people how to program does. I try to do that through writing, and I'd like to think that I've been moderately successful. I sold a few copies of my programming-related book, and many people have met me at conferences and have told me how my blog helped them in some way. It's helped people get over the fears of learning Emacs Lisp, it's helped people start using object databases, it's helped people realize that library code is just like the code they write, and that they can just start contributing! These are all things that make me happy, and knowing that I am helping push other people in this direction makes me even happier. All this by just being instructional and mostly "unbiased"; not every piece of writing that influences someone has to be filled with argumentative rhetoric. (I found out early on that "my $foo is better because $bar" just makes people mad. So I try to write "here's how $foo works" and let people make their own decision. This results in a lot less hate, although I admit that I can't resist writing a good piece of flamebait now and again. It makes me feel good if only one person agrees, and it makes me feel good when someone who I've never met thinks its worth his time to tell me to "die in a fire". Who says I'm not mentally ill?) Anyway, I think writing about programming is highly worthwhile -- both for the author, and the wider "programming community". I'm not going to stop, and I'm not going to miss Joel.
- madair 17y agoHe didn't say it's not worthwhile, on the contrary, Marco laments the loss to programmers and tech writing. What he said is that for him it's not worth the risk of putting himself out there: Some people claim that they don’t care and that they can ignore it. I don’t know if Joel can. I can’t, which is one of the reasons why I rarely write about programming: it’s just not worth the risk of putting myself out there on that subject because the risk of strongly negative feedback is higher than with most other content that I can produce. It’s much easier to share my breakfast than my easily argued, easily disproven, intellectually vulnerable thoughts on programming.
- kscaldef 17y agoIt's rather ironic that the submitter went and changed the title, isn't it?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- _delirium 17y agoMaybe it's relative to what other audiences you also encounter, but I haven't found things too bad in the programming blogosphere. Sure, there are jerks, but there are jerks everywhere. My day-job is in academia, and there are a lot of jerks at academic conferences. You're more likely to get someone furious that you're intruding on their area, or critical that you aren't using their preferred methodology or citing their papers, than you are to get someone genuinely interested in understanding what you're doing and why. I actually sometimes find the tech-blog reception friendlier, on the occasions I've ventured some of my academic work online. Admittedly, it might be worse if I were a celebrity blogger with tons of readers; when only relatively few people read you, generally it's only people who have some reason to like your work that would bother commenting.
- JoeAltmaier 17y agoThis YC thread actually has a lot in common with those nasty programmer-readers. Look at all the personal insults, broad generalizations etc. I guess programmer-readers are everywhere.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- wowus 17y agoSons, I am disappoint.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoComments are disproportionately critical and/or argumentative, but that's because it's a waste of bandwidth to post a comment saying, "I agree!" That's what the up-arrow is for.
- codexon 17y agoBlogs don't usually have up arrows.
- codexon 17y agoWhy the downvotes? The topic of this article is not about Hacker News, it is about blogs in general.
- toothcomb 17y agoIs this what the up arrow is for? I'd rather, insightful, funny, factual. Posting for consensus is pretty pointless in my opinion. Not that it's particularly obvious what that arrow is for in the first place.
- nostrademons 17y agoI don't blog about programming for different reasons... I find that any really interesting programming problem is too complex to be reduced to prose in a form digestible in someone's 10-minute blog break. Yeah, I could post about the umpteenth-zillion Sudoku solver, or about this tricky Haskell problem I solved - but if it's general enough to be broadly interesting, it's too shallow to be enlightening, and if it's deep enough to be useful, it's probably too specific to have a widely interested readership. Worse, I feel that by participating in the blogosphere, I'm deluding myself into thinking that these information soundbites are worth anything, and taking up my attention with little factoids that distract me from getting actually interesting work done. I find that the value of writing about programming is in the "Why?" and the "Roads not taken" of software systems. So I keep a development journal of my personal projects. At the very least, it keeps me from revisiting design decisions I've already decided. But this doesn't need to be public to serve its purpose, and I've found that making it public anyway is too distracting to maintain forward momentum on the projects. Instead, I open things up after the project has succeeded or failed, like I did with Diary of a Failed Startup and like I'll hopefully do with this programming language I'm developing. No, it's not the ego boost that constant, instantaneous feedback gives you - but that ego boost becomes a drug that keeps you from functioning when people (as the article points out) turn on you, as they inevitably do.
- antirez 17y agoWell maybe I live in another world but I think more or less the opposite. You can write about programming and people will love it, and in our industry there are a great deal of people that are at the same time not gross and with good arguments. But... there are many ways to write about programming: one is to actually write about programming, that is, posts containing some experience to share about some technology, or a pattern one writer noticed about programming languages that is interesting, or how to implement such algorithm in a better way, or just this-is-how-I-made-this-stuff and so forth. People tend to love this stuff, if you search the HN / progreddit / slashdot archives. Then there is another way to write about programming: the speculation. A few well known blogs really master this art, as they are able to run successful programming blogs for years without actually ever really writing about programmings. In this blogs you'll find a mix about obvious things narrated in an inspirational way, a few rants about why people should do A instead of B, and so forth. My impression is that the latter kind of blogs, not really designed to share what you think, but more to think about what you could share to be interesting and cool, are the ones more often subject to criticisms.
- dasil003 17y agoThere's another dichotomy: abstract vs concrete. The more abstract, the larger the potential audience. That's the reason why Joel is so much more popular than the guy writing about OCaml optimization techniques for numerical analysis. But writing about generalities is not only hard more open to criticism as you suggest, but they are also harder to come up with because they require more condensed knowledge. Coming from that perspective I can understand why Joel says he has nothing more to write about, and I think it's reflected in the quality of his posts recently.
- aufreak3 17y agoFor quite a while now, I really did feel that Joel has run out of things to say and stopped reading him. So this comes as no surprise (and no loss). His books are still good reads though. Wisdom is also something that is subject to evolution I guess.
- bootload 17y ago"... He has outlasted the relevance of all of them. His first articles would have been frontpaged on whatever came before Slashdot. ..." Not quite true. Slashdot is from about '96 and JOS is from about 1999-2000. Could the real reason be a bit simpler as suggested Joel is running out of new ideas? Is it possible the upcoming IPO might also play part? "... I can’t, which is one of the reasons why I rarely write about programming: it’s just not worth the risk of putting myself out there on that subject because the risk of strongly negative feedback is higher than with most other content that I can produce. It’s much easier to share my breakfast than my easily argued, easily disproven, intellectually vulnerable thoughts on programming. ..." And all loose out. Has this kind of negative feedback held people back from conversing in past times?
- 100k 17y agoI enjoyed the article but as a Slashdot reader back before the word "blog" was invented I knew someone would correct this point! :)
- jacobolus 17y ago> Not quite true. Slashdot is from about '96 I think you’re misreading. The author was saying that Joel’s posts would have been just as relevant before slashdot as they are today, not that the posts actually predate slashdot.
- bootload 17y ago"... I think you’re misreading. The author was saying that Joel’s posts would have been just as relevant before slashdot as they are today ..." Point taken. Misleading though.
- ddaymace 17y agoProgrammer critics can be very difficult, often just as difficult and insulting as the unintelligent critics. However, I find the ignorant people are usually worse and more frequent and are there just to troll or make shocking remarks without even trying to backup with logic. I have seen programmer critics get really bad, nitpicking everything. It's like they have no lives or respect at the worst, trashing everyone like they are smartest in the cosmos.
- forkandwait 17y agoIn the egalitarian listserv world that I frequent, programmers generally are extremely helpful, more patient than necessary, and write remarkably good prose. Perhaps because jerks like to comment on blogs because doing so doesn't have ramifications in a repuation based ecosystem in which there is less asymmetry. It is easy and safe to bad mouth the gods, not so in the assembly...
- pg 17y agoI think it's just as well not to allow comments on one's site. If someone wants to say something about something you've written, they can say it on their own blog or on Twitter. When it's something of theirs they're writing on instead of something of yours, they think twice before being jerks: most people won't create a whole blog post just to make a trollish comment, and someone whose Twitter stream is a series of nasty remarks is not going to have a lot of followers, unless he's very witty. Unfortunately, although I don't have comments on my site, as the moderator of a forum I get them de facto in the comments threads here. It's a uniquely unpleasant situation. In a way it's worse than having comments on my site. On my own site I could delete nasty comments, but here if I do I'll be accused of censorship. Frankly, I'm stumped. I've occasionally thought of banning paulgraham.com, but people would accuse me of censorship if I did that too.
- philk 17y agoThe correct solution is just to ignore them. Sure, they're saying nasty things about you, but no-one's saying anything about them at all.
- pg 17y agoIt's hard to leave a mischaracterization of your ideas unanswered on a forum where people know you participate. I don't worry what people say about me on other sites, because I don't even know what they're saying. But here I do know, and everyone knows I know. Which means in effect someone can call me out here, by phrasing a comment in such a way that if I don't respond it seems like it's because I have no response to make. I think perhaps getting rid of points will mitigate this problem though.
- nostrademons 17y agohttp://xkcd.com/386/ http://xkcd.com/386/ It'd be nice if people recognized that sometimes when folks don't respond, it's because they have better things to do, and not because they agree with what's being said.
- patio11 17y ago
- nir 17y ago%99 of the time, Joel-style posts about programming in general are a boring rehash of ideas already expressed better before (often by Joel himself). Same goes for "10 things every start up should know" etc. They're great for HN karma, poor as reading material. Blog posts about actual programming, as in "here's how I implemented x" are almost always a great read, and if they are really good they will sustain their value for a long time and reach far beyond the blog's readership as they start appearing in Google searches etc. It's all about signal vs noise. You may have a great insight, but if Joel/37 Signals/Coding Horror/etc already wrote about it you're just adding more noise.
- adriand 17y agoI agree 100%. There's a million posts by people (like Mark Cuban for example) full of the same old boring crap: "maintain good communication", "don't spend money on swag / unnecessary items / etc.", blah blah blah. If generalized advice actually worked for human beings, the entire human race would probably be a lot better off. In practice, I find it hard to believe that anyone takes these lists of dos and don'ts and actually turns them into guiding principles for how they run their business.
- philk 17y agoTo be honest it's more that the vast bulk of people read these things then do whatever they were already planning to do. Losing weight, for example, should be really simple but there's a boatload of people out there who don't seem to be able to follow the "heavy weightlifting + calorie controlled diet" advice.
- zaidf 17y agoI disagree. I think the repetition is critical, at least for me, simply because I tend to apply more of messages I recieve again and again. On paper what you say makes sense(repetitive content = noise) but in practice there's still value in repeating certain messages.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- raganwald 17y agoAnecdote: I write about programming, and it is entirely worthwhile for me. I changed my style of writing at a certain point, but that had more to do with what I wanted to explore than with whether people were critical. Speaking of which, lots of people have said critical things about my writing. But lots more said nice things. Overall, I feel that I get far more positive feedback than negative. I could be wearing rose-coloured glasses. So... My experience differs from the author. But that makes sense, we are different people.
- softbuilder 17y agoCaviar problem. See also: William Devaughn.
- k-zed 17y agoSorry, Joel Spolsky has been fantastically, offensively wrong often. Significantly often. Attracting negative attention should be considered normal.
- blubb 17y agoFantastically, offensively wrong? Care to give an example? I think a lot of the "he's wrong" reactions stem from knee-jerk reactions. People often miss the point that what he's writing about comes form his own experience. It might not be universally true, but he will still have valid points worthy of consideration. Then again, people writing angry comments are rarely the kind of people who will take the time to reflect on what they read.
- melito 17y agoNot doing something simply because people will criticize you is a terrible approach to anything.