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This Teflon you're talking about, it's a thing. Not just with CORS, not just with you. For example, I've gotten decent at regular expressions a few times but

This Teflon you're talking about, it's a thing. Not just with CORS, not just with you. For example, I've gotten decent at regular expressions a few times but have to keep relearning it. Adding insult to injury, I might relearn something from Stackoverflow, and realize afterwards I posted the answer! Not for trivial stuff. But a string of punctuation with capture groups or whatever, forget about it [1]. Any support for this informal draft definition below? ------------------ Teflon tech (draft definition v0.1 [2]) Knowledge that could be learned by most with reasonable effort, but often must be relearned or is never fully grokked. This can be due to infrequent opportunities to recall the concepts in a particular role, or insufficient need to apply (thereby practicing) the relevant techniques. It may also occur when a tech is used frequently but the foundational theory is hidden by the use of higher level abstractions. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1381097/how-do-i-get-the-name-of-captured-groups-in-a-c-sharp-regex https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1381097/how-do-i-get-the... [2] content provided under MIT license.

justinclift 7y ago
Javascript is like this with me. I have no idea why. Probably my having a super low opinion of it's whole ecosystem doesn't help. ;)
- lacampbell 7y ago
  I think it's 100% because you don't like Javascript. You resent having to learn it. I feel the exact same way about Git, I've never been able to stomach it, I'm bewildered as to why the entire programming community have decided it's the one VCS to rule them all, and I resent having to grok its UI. The Javascript ecosystem is huge. It's also the wild west, completely non-curated, open to anyone, and you have to treat it accordingly. It's not really one entity.
  - james_s_tayler 7y ago
    Git is amazing, beautiful piece of software. But... sigh I feel exactly how you feel about Git about Vim. It's the one editor everyone has decided despite it's arcane and bizarre UX that you aren't a real programmer if you don't know. Refuse to learn it. Absolutely refuse. I think everyone has one of those things.
    - recursive 7y ago
      I have at least 2. Git and vim. It seems fitting then, that vim should be the default editor for git's commit messages.
      - james_s_tayler 7y ago
        Hahahaha. Hot damn. Oh that would really get my goat.
dkarl 7y ago
I call it my intellectual immune system, but it might be more like a runaway process killer or an OOM-killer. It hates ugliness, and it hates complexity. I kind of appreciate its attempts to clean Javascript out of my brain. Even though it makes it frustrating to do front end tasks, I appreciate the good intentions. In the 2000s I learned Perl no less than three times. I was really impressed by what people could do with small scripts and one-liners, and I wanted that power for myself. I got really good three times, and each time it took me less time to forget it than it took me to learn it. I did not agree with its decision in that case, but I lost the argument.
- adtac 7y ago
  As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of an unrelated analogy involving computer science and software engineering approaches 1. I shall graciously accept this being called adtac's law out of sheer humility :P
  - dkarl 7y ago
    More like: people rely on shared knowledge when communicating. This is Hacker News, after all.
james_s_tayler 7y ago
Anki
Splines 7y ago
Probably some combination of things that break principle of least surprise along with not needing to think about that thing very frequently. A good IDE and good coding standards can smooth things over. I'm ok with regex too, but if you asked me to do something with look-behind I'd have to experiment a little to figure out how it works again.
abecedarius 7y ago
I think the proposed definition is too sympathetic to the Teflon. Sometimes a whole approach is misconceived, yielding billowing complexity; it may be too hard to see through the fog to be sure of this in particular cases, but surely it happens. This can apply to the "foundational theory" too.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Yeah I keep regex syntax pinned up at my desk because it always gets cache-flushed beyond the basics even if I used it yesterday.
edejong 7y ago
I only just read this comment. It is golden. Now we should just bookmark this comment and use the term teflon tech as often as possible to make it stick (euhm...)

justinclift 7y ago

Javascript is like this with me. I have no idea why. Probably my having a super low opinion of it's whole ecosystem doesn't help. ;)

lacampbell 7y ago
I think it's 100% because you don't like Javascript. You resent having to learn it. I feel the exact same way about Git, I've never been able to stomach it, I'm bewildered as to why the entire programming community have decided it's the one VCS to rule them all, and I resent having to grok its UI. The Javascript ecosystem is huge. It's also the wild west, completely non-curated, open to anyone, and you have to treat it accordingly. It's not really one entity.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  Git is amazing, beautiful piece of software. But... sigh I feel exactly how you feel about Git about Vim. It's the one editor everyone has decided despite it's arcane and bizarre UX that you aren't a real programmer if you don't know. Refuse to learn it. Absolutely refuse. I think everyone has one of those things.
  - recursive 7y ago
    I have at least 2. Git and vim. It seems fitting then, that vim should be the default editor for git's commit messages.
    - james_s_tayler 7y ago
      Hahahaha. Hot damn. Oh that would really get my goat.

dkarl 7y ago

I call it my intellectual immune system, but it might be more like a runaway process killer or an OOM-killer. It hates ugliness, and it hates complexity. I kind of appreciate its attempts to clean Javascript out of my brain. Even though it makes it frustrating to do front end tasks, I appreciate the good intentions. In the 2000s I learned Perl no less than three times. I was really impressed by what people could do with small scripts and one-liners, and I wanted that power for myself. I got really good three times, and each time it took me less time to forget it than it took me to learn it. I did not agree with its decision in that case, but I lost the argument.

adtac 7y ago
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of an unrelated analogy involving computer science and software engineering approaches 1. I shall graciously accept this being called adtac's law out of sheer humility :P
- dkarl 7y ago
  More like: people rely on shared knowledge when communicating. This is Hacker News, after all.

james_s_tayler 7y ago

Anki

Splines 7y ago

Probably some combination of things that break principle of least surprise along with not needing to think about that thing very frequently. A good IDE and good coding standards can smooth things over. I'm ok with regex too, but if you asked me to do something with look-behind I'd have to experiment a little to figure out how it works again.

abecedarius 7y ago

I think the proposed definition is too sympathetic to the Teflon. Sometimes a whole approach is misconceived, yielding billowing complexity; it may be too hard to see through the fog to be sure of this in particular cases, but surely it happens. This can apply to the "foundational theory" too.

Nasrudith 7y ago

Yeah I keep regex syntax pinned up at my desk because it always gets cache-flushed beyond the basics even if I used it yesterday.

edejong 7y ago

I only just read this comment. It is golden. Now we should just bookmark this comment and use the term teflon tech as often as possible to make it stick (euhm...)