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As someone with a chemistry interest these thoughts mirror mine unironically, so I doubt this comment was a joke. I think it's a fair reaction to be mildly ann
by ATsch 9y ago
As someone with a chemistry interest these thoughts mirror mine unironically, so I doubt this comment was a joke.
I think it's a fair reaction to be mildly annoyed when someone uses something within your field without any real understanding what it does.
After all, programmers are one of the first to point fingers and laugh when e.g. movies use random code snippets or wrong jargon. One of those "Periodic Table of X" things is basically the chemist equivalent of Saying "I'll write a GUI in Visual Basic to track the killer".
This website has a different purpose though, as many people note.
- jjjensen90 9y agoWhy do you think they have no real understanding of what the periodic table does? This is a really silly reaction. If someone made a map of the US with only cities that have repositories named after them highlighted or some such thing would reasonable geographers think, "this is meaningless! They don't even understand what a map is!" (I hope not). It's something for fun, and not presenting itself any other way... It's not even "abusing" the period table format for some other data (when I saw the link I thought it might be related to languages used on GitHub), it's literally mirroring the names of the elements that are in the real table but linking to projects with the same name... Sometimes I just don't get some perspectives on HN--if I were a chemist who also knew that naming things in software is hard, it probably would have made me chuckle not furrow my brow. Edit: missing word