5 ms·

What does "sanity" mean? Without the curiosity to drive us, we wouldn't have moved out of chilly caves. Yes, like most initiatives, you are set for failure, if

What does "sanity" mean? Without the curiosity to drive us, we wouldn't have moved out of chilly caves. Yes, like most initiatives, you are set for failure, if you define success by how popular a creation of yours becomes. You can still learn a lot. And still, because "success" is such a rare breed, we actually need more people to do challenging stuff, so we'd get more success in absolute numbers. The OP actually lacks sanity in recognizing that their project did not take off, and they don't have a clear idea of why they are doing their programming language project. Basically, they are realising it's not a success, and they don't necessarily care about learning much out of it, and yet are still not letting go. If anything, that's a definition of insanity :)

eternityforest 5y ago
It's more like addiction than insanity. They aren't doing the same thing and expecting different results exactly... They're doing the same thing just... because it's part of their identity now, even though they aren't all that happy. Real insanity would be still thinking it was gonna be the next big hit. I think we'd get more successes if people didn't didn't do this stuff and instead joined existing projects, or started with the business stuff first and tried to start their own foundations and such. There are big wins, but they're incredibly rare and seem very random. And many of them are almost guaranteed to fail. You'll learn a lot, but what can you actually use that knowledge for? Niche DIY stuff doesn't teach you much about mainstream methods. The result is 1000 garage tinkerers for every Guido Van Rossum, and sometimes it's even actively detrimental to a project to try to cater to the tinkerers.
- lolinder 5y ago
  > I think we'd get more successes if people didn't didn't do this stuff and instead joined existing projects, or started with the business stuff first and tried to start their own foundations and such. I think that you're working from a very different definition of "success" than your parent comment. "Success" doesn't have to mean "contributed to GDP". For some people "success" means "I had fun, learned stuff, and expanded myself as a person".
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    I'm using the definition the original article seems to imply. Not so much contributed to the GDP, but "Advanced the state of the art in some way" or "Solved a problem of interest outside the programming community". I would imagine only the very most dedicated would actually enjoy doing a new language, maybe a third of programmers, and probably only those who fully accepted their thing was probably not going to be an enterprise grade solution.
- samatman 5y ago
  The issue I have with your approach is twofold: the 1000 garage tinkerers are harmless, and your approach forgoes the Guido Van Rossums, Rich Hickeys, Chris Lattners and so on. I've met a bunch of people who do things like write their own typed concatenative language. So I can tell you, first of all, that they tend to spend the week merrily contributing to, say, orchestrating Kube clusters, and second, the time they spend bit banging their pet programming language wasn't going to go towards more orchestrating Kube clusters. Or whatever it is you think is actually important.
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    That's fine, but it seems like the target audience of the article is the people who hope to become the next Van Rossum. It might even be aimed at people deciding whether their team at work should pursue a new language for some specific task. Maybe this could be solved with a special badge that tells people which of the Three Tribes of Programmers you're writing for... For purely toy projects, I'm not sure if any code blog advice at all is that helpful, except possibly "Make stuff really small if you want to impress other programmers". Best Practices don't apply the same way to this kind of thing, since in a real industry project the best practice would probably be "Just don't".

eternityforest 5y ago

It's more like addiction than insanity. They aren't doing the same thing and expecting different results exactly... They're doing the same thing just... because it's part of their identity now, even though they aren't all that happy. Real insanity would be still thinking it was gonna be the next big hit. I think we'd get more successes if people didn't didn't do this stuff and instead joined existing projects, or started with the business stuff first and tried to start their own foundations and such. There are big wins, but they're incredibly rare and seem very random. And many of them are almost guaranteed to fail. You'll learn a lot, but what can you actually use that knowledge for? Niche DIY stuff doesn't teach you much about mainstream methods. The result is 1000 garage tinkerers for every Guido Van Rossum, and sometimes it's even actively detrimental to a project to try to cater to the tinkerers.

lolinder 5y ago
> I think we'd get more successes if people didn't didn't do this stuff and instead joined existing projects, or started with the business stuff first and tried to start their own foundations and such. I think that you're working from a very different definition of "success" than your parent comment. "Success" doesn't have to mean "contributed to GDP". For some people "success" means "I had fun, learned stuff, and expanded myself as a person".
- eternityforest 5y ago
  I'm using the definition the original article seems to imply. Not so much contributed to the GDP, but "Advanced the state of the art in some way" or "Solved a problem of interest outside the programming community". I would imagine only the very most dedicated would actually enjoy doing a new language, maybe a third of programmers, and probably only those who fully accepted their thing was probably not going to be an enterprise grade solution.
samatman 5y ago
The issue I have with your approach is twofold: the 1000 garage tinkerers are harmless, and your approach forgoes the Guido Van Rossums, Rich Hickeys, Chris Lattners and so on. I've met a bunch of people who do things like write their own typed concatenative language. So I can tell you, first of all, that they tend to spend the week merrily contributing to, say, orchestrating Kube clusters, and second, the time they spend bit banging their pet programming language wasn't going to go towards more orchestrating Kube clusters. Or whatever it is you think is actually important.
- eternityforest 5y ago
  That's fine, but it seems like the target audience of the article is the people who hope to become the next Van Rossum. It might even be aimed at people deciding whether their team at work should pursue a new language for some specific task. Maybe this could be solved with a special badge that tells people which of the Three Tribes of Programmers you're writing for... For purely toy projects, I'm not sure if any code blog advice at all is that helpful, except possibly "Make stuff really small if you want to impress other programmers". Best Practices don't apply the same way to this kind of thing, since in a real industry project the best practice would probably be "Just don't".