3 ms·

I find this article to be very clear and readable overall, despite the presence of a few "cultural markers" such as the above language. In comparison with the t

I find this article to be very clear and readable overall, despite the presence of a few "cultural markers" such as the above language. In comparison with the truly opaque and mostly content-free works of the most notorious poststructuralists, the claim of the article ("assertions about programmer productivity are presented as scientific facts but are not founded on a large body of experimental evidence we expect from such claims") is clearly stated. That said, my own personal experience and observation is that the 10x claim probably underestimates the difference in productivity between the best and worst coders.

j_baker 16y ago
Ahem... I really hate to make ad hominem arguments, but when you say things like "In comparison with the truly opaque and mostly content-free works of the most notorious poststructuralists, the claim of the article ... is clearly stated", I have to question if your definition of "clearly stated" is the same as mine. :-)
- mycroftiv 16y ago
  I'm sure our definitions differ. For comparison, here is a quote from a translation of Guattari's "Chaosmosis" (1992) which I would say is unclear: "The ontological relativity advocated here is inseparable from an enunciative relativity. Knowledge of a Universe (in an astrophysical or axiological sense) is only possible through the mediation of autopoietic machines. A zone of self-belonging needs to exist somewhere for the coming into cognitive existence of any being or any modality of being." That is the kind of language which made many European intellectuals in the later half of the 20th century notorious. The problem is not just an unusual vocabulary and elaborate sentence structure, but fundamental incoherence and haphazard use of undefined terms. I don't believe the linked article under discussion is really in the same category.

j_baker 16y ago

Ahem... I really hate to make ad hominem arguments, but when you say things like "In comparison with the truly opaque and mostly content-free works of the most notorious poststructuralists, the claim of the article ... is clearly stated", I have to question if your definition of "clearly stated" is the same as mine. :-)

mycroftiv 16y ago
I'm sure our definitions differ. For comparison, here is a quote from a translation of Guattari's "Chaosmosis" (1992) which I would say is unclear: "The ontological relativity advocated here is inseparable from an enunciative relativity. Knowledge of a Universe (in an astrophysical or axiological sense) is only possible through the mediation of autopoietic machines. A zone of self-belonging needs to exist somewhere for the coming into cognitive existence of any being or any modality of being." That is the kind of language which made many European intellectuals in the later half of the 20th century notorious. The problem is not just an unusual vocabulary and elaborate sentence structure, but fundamental incoherence and haphazard use of undefined terms. I don't believe the linked article under discussion is really in the same category.