5 ms·

Oh, for christ's sake. I don't want to get all "get off my lawn" but HN is full of early-20-somethings rediscovering things and calling them 'bleeding edge'.

Oh, for christ's sake. I don't want to get all "get off my lawn" but HN is full of early-20-somethings rediscovering things and calling them 'bleeding edge'. The highest paid people in our industry are working on drudgery full-time for FAANG. And that's fine, people have families, I'm not judging anyone. But let's not fool ourselves.

GordonS 7y ago
A good example of this is static typing - shat on for years by HN, and now, all of a sudden it's the greatest thing since sliced bread!
- staticTypes 7y ago
  And you know why, right? Fucking JavaScript. Strong static types have always been awesome, because there are no mysteries, no surprises. A chair is a chair. A wheel is a wheel. Fire is hot and water is wet. But, hey, fucking JavaScript, so look at my bullshit variable! Is it a function? Sure! Does it have properties! You bet! Is it a chair? Who the fuck knows! The 'legs' array is undefined... Can we make it a chair? Of course! I need a wheel, can we make it a wheel too? You betcha! Just assign more fucking properties! Yayyyyyyyyyyyyy!!! Hey, can I post this retarded data bag right the fuck back over to two different API endpoints? Why the fuck not? Okay, assholes, check out my greasy, cheese filled, swiss army bullshit unicycle or whatever the fuck this is, I don't even fucking care anymore, because I can't wait to just become an amnesiac, dump my client side session cache and pretend this whole fucking nightmare never even happened.
- AsyncAwait 7y ago
  Yeah, but I think the kind of static typing that was 'shat on' for years is not the same as the one being praised today. The shat on one is the old Java, verbose, obtrusive style. The newly praised one is Haskell-style, type inferred, expressive... Now you could say that's not new, BUT what is new is marrying ML style type system to languages whose other concepts devs are largely familiar with and packaging it the right way to get into production, instead of just academia and that being the case even for historically impenetrable low-level programming and such.
  - wildermuthn 7y ago
    These are the kind of comments that make HN so special: knowledgeable and insightful, due to deep experience with the past and critical understanding of the present. It isn’t just a rush to what is shiny and new, but is capable of identifying what is novel and valuable, and is articulate enough to explain why. Normally my comment would be an unnecessary back-slapping, but since the conversation veered this way, I think it is appropriate to call out your comment as something that represents the spirit that makes HN unique and wonderful.
    - tamrix 7y ago
      I never realised how highly some people praise hackernews comments lol Hackernews has an _instagram filter_ where everybody brags about how smart they are. Then there's a bunch of fresh grads who fanboy their favourite tech companies. Then every so often you get a gem of a comment from knowledge leader in the industry. But that's quickly overshadowed by 'my Startup, my Startup, mah Startup' and how everybody wants to be rich one day. But like every larger community in the internet, it eventually derives itself into an echo chamber.
      - nimih 7y ago
        Current-day HN strikes me as very similar to early 00s Slashdot, albeit more self-serious and with an ideology more informed by SV capitalism/entrepreneurialism than the convoluted politics of open source software.
  - Mouse47 7y ago
    Agreed. The article that opened my eyes to this shows (IMO) a serious deficiency in C#'s type system compared to F#'s, which includes the concept of tagged-union types. It shows a very simple shopping cart program that can't be modeled cleanly in c# without using the visitor pattern....which is difficult to read IMO. https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/csharp/union-types-in-csharp.html https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/csharp/union-types-in-csha...

GordonS 7y ago

A good example of this is static typing - shat on for years by HN, and now, all of a sudden it's the greatest thing since sliced bread!

staticTypes 7y ago
And you know why, right? Fucking JavaScript. Strong static types have always been awesome, because there are no mysteries, no surprises. A chair is a chair. A wheel is a wheel. Fire is hot and water is wet. But, hey, fucking JavaScript, so look at my bullshit variable! Is it a function? Sure! Does it have properties! You bet! Is it a chair? Who the fuck knows! The 'legs' array is undefined... Can we make it a chair? Of course! I need a wheel, can we make it a wheel too? You betcha! Just assign more fucking properties! Yayyyyyyyyyyyyy!!! Hey, can I post this retarded data bag right the fuck back over to two different API endpoints? Why the fuck not? Okay, assholes, check out my greasy, cheese filled, swiss army bullshit unicycle or whatever the fuck this is, I don't even fucking care anymore, because I can't wait to just become an amnesiac, dump my client side session cache and pretend this whole fucking nightmare never even happened.
AsyncAwait 7y ago
Yeah, but I think the kind of static typing that was 'shat on' for years is not the same as the one being praised today. The shat on one is the old Java, verbose, obtrusive style. The newly praised one is Haskell-style, type inferred, expressive... Now you could say that's not new, BUT what is new is marrying ML style type system to languages whose other concepts devs are largely familiar with and packaging it the right way to get into production, instead of just academia and that being the case even for historically impenetrable low-level programming and such.
- wildermuthn 7y ago
  These are the kind of comments that make HN so special: knowledgeable and insightful, due to deep experience with the past and critical understanding of the present. It isn’t just a rush to what is shiny and new, but is capable of identifying what is novel and valuable, and is articulate enough to explain why. Normally my comment would be an unnecessary back-slapping, but since the conversation veered this way, I think it is appropriate to call out your comment as something that represents the spirit that makes HN unique and wonderful.
  - tamrix 7y ago
    I never realised how highly some people praise hackernews comments lol Hackernews has an _instagram filter_ where everybody brags about how smart they are. Then there's a bunch of fresh grads who fanboy their favourite tech companies. Then every so often you get a gem of a comment from knowledge leader in the industry. But that's quickly overshadowed by 'my Startup, my Startup, mah Startup' and how everybody wants to be rich one day. But like every larger community in the internet, it eventually derives itself into an echo chamber.
    - nimih 7y ago
      Current-day HN strikes me as very similar to early 00s Slashdot, albeit more self-serious and with an ideology more informed by SV capitalism/entrepreneurialism than the convoluted politics of open source software.
- Mouse47 7y ago
  Agreed. The article that opened my eyes to this shows (IMO) a serious deficiency in C#'s type system compared to F#'s, which includes the concept of tagged-union types. It shows a very simple shopping cart program that can't be modeled cleanly in c# without using the visitor pattern....which is difficult to read IMO. https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/csharp/union-types-in-csharp.html https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/csharp/union-types-in-csha...