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The point of the article isn't to belittle someone for having a good, deep knowledge of machines. The foundation of most code written is built by those people.

The point of the article isn't to belittle someone for having a good, deep knowledge of machines. The foundation of most code written is built by those people. The point of the article is to point out that languages, frameworks, or apis that expect a level of discipline to write well are inferior to ones that don't expect discipline out of its coders. The takeaway shouldn't be - I as a programmer shouldn't learn how the machine works. The takeaway should be - if I'm designing an API/Language/framework, I should figure out how much I'm relying on an engineer's discipline to make the code great (performant, robust, secure, etc). If I can reduce that reliance, the API/Language/Framework becomes better.

hrktb 6y ago
I like the focus on scale in the title, and think it’s very apt. Requiring discipline is not superior or inferior, but doesn’t scale. It’s then your to decide how much it matters: do you have/need to only focus on a small group or are you tools targeted at a wide audience or you want it to widely succeed ? The answers to that question won’t be the same for everyone.
- spyckie2 6y ago
  My usage of inferior/superior is contextualized mainly to scaling but the article mentioned many more things other than scale in the anecdotes (like producing better code overall). Maybe the vagueness of the word choice is a bit controversial in this definition-sensitive environment.
imtringued 6y ago
Well, and here I thought that discipline doesn't scale because it is not a universal concept. Having "discipline" in C will not transfer to better discipline in other languages because each language has a different feature to abuse. C might have malloc/free with catastrophic consequences but C++ has templates which lend themselves to a different type of abuse i.e. excess complexity.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
> “ The point of the article is to point out that languages, frameworks, or apis that expect a level of discipline to write well are inferior to ones that don't expect discipline out of its coders.” I think this is what the parent comment that you responded to is saying is totally bogus. A good example is Python. In my company, the teams using Python run circles around the teams using C++ and Java. The Python teams ship higher quality stuff that is both more reliable (it turns out that lack of a compiler for various static checks not only doesn’t make anything more reliable, but also slows things down unreasonably on large code bases), and easier to modify and adapt to changing requirements.

hrktb 6y ago

I like the focus on scale in the title, and think it’s very apt. Requiring discipline is not superior or inferior, but doesn’t scale. It’s then your to decide how much it matters: do you have/need to only focus on a small group or are you tools targeted at a wide audience or you want it to widely succeed ? The answers to that question won’t be the same for everyone.

spyckie2 6y ago
My usage of inferior/superior is contextualized mainly to scaling but the article mentioned many more things other than scale in the anecdotes (like producing better code overall). Maybe the vagueness of the word choice is a bit controversial in this definition-sensitive environment.

imtringued 6y ago

Well, and here I thought that discipline doesn't scale because it is not a universal concept. Having "discipline" in C will not transfer to better discipline in other languages because each language has a different feature to abuse. C might have malloc/free with catastrophic consequences but C++ has templates which lend themselves to a different type of abuse i.e. excess complexity.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

> “ The point of the article is to point out that languages, frameworks, or apis that expect a level of discipline to write well are inferior to ones that don't expect discipline out of its coders.” I think this is what the parent comment that you responded to is saying is totally bogus. A good example is Python. In my company, the teams using Python run circles around the teams using C++ and Java. The Python teams ship higher quality stuff that is both more reliable (it turns out that lack of a compiler for various static checks not only doesn’t make anything more reliable, but also slows things down unreasonably on large code bases), and easier to modify and adapt to changing requirements.