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This just as easily applies to artists, its definitely not inherent to engineering.
by npunt 7y ago
This just as easily applies to artists, its definitely not inherent to engineering.
- HPsquared 7y agoIn a way, engineers are a type of artist.
- lisper 7y agoYes, but management wants them to be assembly-line workers. A lot of organizational tension in tech companies can be traced back to botched attempts to force-fit artistic pegs into assembly-line holes.
- emeraldd 7y agoHonestly, this is probably a big part of the reason I've really come to dislike things like Scrum and what Agile looks like now. My experience has been that these methodologies tend to treat devs as fungible cogs which fits very much with the idea of engineers/developers as assembly line workers.
- lisper 7y agoExactly this. Management wants every part of the production process to be easily replaceable, including the people. This is why management loves, e.g., Java. Java gives you a lot of the benefits of Lisp (GC, objects, exceptions) but without any of the features that facilitate writing beautiful elegant code. So Java code is ugly and festooned with boilerplate and using it is an incredibly painful experience (for a Lisp programmer). But if I'm a manager and I have a Java programmer working for me and one day I don't like the cut of his jib, I can fire him and instantly replace him with another Java programmer, because they are a dime a dozen and one is as good as another. As a manager, that one feature dominates all the cruft and the horror, because I don't have to deal with the cruft, I hire you to deal with it for me. And your replacability gives me power over you. So you type boilerplate while I play golf. It would be a pretty good deal if I enjoyed golf as much as I enjoy writing Lisp code.
- stevenwliao 7y agoHow's the state of Lisp in production these days?
- lisper 7y agoMy one-man company uses a bespoke e-commerce system written in Lisp. It uses Stripe and Easypost on the back end and gives me a completely seamless fulfillment process that lets me ship anywhere in the world with essentially zero effort. I also consult for a major chip developer to help them maintain an internal design tool written in Common Lisp which they consider to be a major source of their competitive advantage. So it's not widely used, but where it is used it's a big win.
- klipt 7y agoSounds like lisp is good for a team of size 1, but are there any larger teams using lisp successfully? I've heard theories that lisp teams don't scale well because the language is so customisable that team members have trouble reading each other's code.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoHell I have trouble reading my own code. Dense, arcane, not descriptive of what's going on. FWIW
- kazinator 7y agoI love my code. Whether it's 6 months old or 20 years, I can readily understand it, and prefer it other people's code by a wide margin.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoMust not be learning? My code changes because I learn and change.
- lliamander 7y agoI think the problem lies with who owns the process. If engineers own the process, then things can work. If non-engineers own the process, then you get the assembly-line mentality. Whether one calls it "Agile" is really irrelevant.
- creed98 7y agoEmeraldledger.com
- seedless-sensat 7y agoA lot of application software is fungible, boring, and just needs to get done. Agile helps with that. No one is suggesting planning poker for qubit wiring.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TecoAndJix 7y ago"I myself am a master of the software arts - or an engineer if you want to be a dick about it" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4MCXotzJfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4MCXotzJfA
- whatevertrevor 7y ago"developer" if you're a canadian