25 ms·

The silent majority in software

291 points by bndr 4y ago

devmunchies 4y ago
Thanks for the article. I do feel like engineers who put themselves out there and engage on HN, Github, Chat groups, etc, get "polished" and get better as engineers, assuming that association in these forums causes them to read more code or think about paradigms. If "silent" are mostly keeping to themselves, they might have some of their own innovations independent from mainstream engineering, but lack common knowledge, which can be accounted for by reading a lot of programming books, release notes, docs, etc. Unrelated, some unsolicited feedback for bloggers, I like to click on images to zoom in (quicker than ctrl+equal 5 times). So at the very least please wrap the images in a link to the image src. a humble request.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  It's possible to read on the internet without engaging in arguments.
  - devmunchies 4y ago
    I know :). That's why I was unambiguously grateful for the article and polite in my humble request.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      I was responding to the idea that the silent majority lacks common knowledge by default.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  > Unrelated, some unsolicited feedback for bloggers, I like to click on images to zoom in (quicker than ctrl+equal 5 times). So at the very least please wrap the images in a link to the image src. a humble request. I suggest using a TamperMonkey script to accomplish this on your end; outside of thumbnail galleries, it runs against common expectations, so you'll have better luck taking control yourself.
googlryas 4y ago
Don't forget the silent majority in FANGs either. A lot of us aren't working on crazy machine learning models, were just copying protobufs from one form to another.
- fragmede 4y ago
  Could be worse, could be GCL or borgmon.
politelemon 4y ago
I'm surprised no mention of this very topic from ten years ago. Dark matter developers. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-unseen-99 https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
ttgurney 4y ago
> They do not participate in controversial discussions about Visual Basic or Pascal — they just do their work in those languages without even knowing that there’s so much controversy surrounding their language of choice. Serious question: are these languages actually controversial? Doesn't "controversy" usually mean people holding strong opinions and frequently disagreeing? I rarely hear anything at all about Pascal or Visual Basic. Maybe they were controversial in the 1990s? Now I'd call them merely unfashionable.
- wainstead 4y ago
  Perhaps OP meant Pascal programmers arguing among themselves, rather than arguing with anti-Pascal programmers? I'd expect such a smallish community of developers to find plenty of common grown in such a stable technology, so no need to throw stones.
kasajian 4y ago
"Visual Basic or Pascal"? Is this written in early 90s?
- heywire 4y ago
  I work for a large financial services company who still maintains software written in both VB (6) and Pascal (well, Delphi).
wenbin 4y ago
* Making money from your own project is bad. You shouldn't put ads or charge a SaaS fee from your own project / startup / small business. But it's okay to be well paid by a FAANG as an employee. * "I can build this over a weekend." - when someone posts their own project here * "I don't understand why they need to hire so many people" - when learning that a tiny app (e.g., Twitter, Uber) has thousands employees.
bpmayer 4y ago
This original silent majority was a victim of Soviet propaganda. Nothing is better in war when the enemy no longer wants to fight because he has self-doubt.
thrown_22 4y ago
>And that’s fine, we’re all amateurs, and sometimes we can be wrong. I'm not an amateur. Or if I am than everyone is too since I have written software for project that would kill tens of thousands if it fails. Other than that the vocal minority was always my opinion on Rust. A small core of true believers who decided that convincing people they should change the world is worth more than actually doing any work in Rust.
- verisimilitudes 4y ago
  Such a saying is what the incompetent obsessively repeat to themselves. They can't stand by the thought of people who don't need an Internet connection to program, who don't copy and paste from the fools over at StackOverflow, and the many other things they do which their betters don't. The fools over at Reddit call some things "adulting", because the idea of growing out of childhood is so foreign to them that they'd rather make it childish too. It's the same basic disease.
  - tailspin2019 4y ago
    > we’re all amateurs, and sometimes we can be wrong. > Such a saying is what the incompetent obsessively repeat to themselves. I'll take humble over arrogant.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      Being humble is saying "I'm an amateur" saying "Everyone is an amateur" is the opposite of humble.
    - wiseowise 4y ago
      There’s difference between being humble and insecure. Generally people who repeat that mantra are trying to guard themselves by “we’re all fools”veil from any critique.
Transfinity 4y ago
> The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. Excuse me? The "silent majority" was the set of Americans who were for the war, not (loudly) protesting against it. Nixon was all for continuing the war.
- freddie_mercury 4y ago
  That's literally what it says in the very next sentence. "In this usage, it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time"
  - astura 4y ago
    It was stealthily changed. Someone else quoted the original further down in the comments > The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. He spoke to the people who were not actively voicing their opinions and who were overshadowed by the vocal few who were supporting the war.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
throwawaylmtn 4y ago
Can we please stop supporting political operations like BLM, MAGA, and political parties in software. I am tired of every open source project asking for donations to BLM. Uyghurs matter too.
- wellokthen2 4y ago
silisili 4y ago
> Usually, the comments on HN/Reddit are polarised by a single group of people who have the same opinion, Can't speak for Reddit, but that's not at all the case here. For example, I often speak of my hatred of microservices here. I'll get some upvotes and agreement, some people telling me it's a dumb opinion, and some people telling me we're doing it wrong and explain their right way. Believe it or not, I learn a lot from different people and their experiences. I can't think of a single topic that seems to be prevelant here that doesn't have a sizeable amount of disagreement, in fact. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
- politelemon 4y ago
  > but that's not at all the case here. Very sorry but it absolutely is the case here. Your anecdotal data is limited to you, but HN very much operates as a hive mind, it just hides it better. Considering this place to be "superior" to other places only leads to complacence and further strengthens the echo chamber.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - timeon 4y ago
    > HN very much operates as a hive mind Most of us here agree with you.
- jrm4 4y ago
  It's getting better, but e.g. try talking about race.
- jonshariat 4y ago
  I think your experience actually proves the point and touches on why many dangerous and crazy POV have also been getting so much air time in the news. Let's say you have 2 opposing POV: A or B "A" has a silent majority so only 5 of the 5,000 people post a comment about A being the right POV. "B" is a passionate minority so 5 of the 50 people post a comment about B being the right POV. To the viewer, it looks like a balanced discussion and a topic open to much debate, both sides have equal voice but in reality "A" is by far the most accepted position.
ttpphd 4y ago
There's nothing quite like an author getting basic history completely wrong at the very beginning. Really builds confidence.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  Do you mean the paragraph that was lifted almost verbatim from the first paragraph of this Wikipedia page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority
  - ttpphd 4y ago
    Oh bless your heart
- hot_gril 4y ago
  And it's even the title of the article.
- lvturner 4y ago
  What color is the bike-shed?
  - ttpphd 4y ago
    The actual silent majority was a violent, reactionary, prowar group led by Nixon. They were not anti war, and they were not silent. The comparison the author made is an incredibly bad analogy, at least to anyone who actually understands reality.
  - quietbritishjim 4y ago
    If the colour of the bike shed is in the name of your nuclear reactor, maybe it actually does matter.
- trasz 4y ago
  Nixon’s internal politics isn’t “basic history” anywhere except US.
evan_ 4y ago
> The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. He spoke to the people who were not actively voicing their opinions and who were overshadowed by the vocal few who were supporting the war. This is a shocking misunderstanding of history. The “silent majority” Nixon spoke of were folks opposed to anti-war protests. Nixon intentionally prolonged the war for political gain- killing additional thousands of people. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nixon-prolonged-vietnam-war-for-political-gainand-johnson-knew-about-it-newly-unclassified-tapes-suggest-3595441/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nixon-prolonged-vi... If you ever find yourself about to say that Nixon did something that a non-evil person would do, you’d better triple check your facts.
- bndr 4y ago
  Fixed it. Thank you :) Just took the quote directly from Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority#:~:text=The%20term%20was%20popularized%20by,the%20large%20demonstrations%20against%20the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority#:~:text=The%20...
  - olau 4y ago
    Just to save time for other people who might be wondering how Wikipedia could get this wrong, bndr seems to have forgotten to read the last part of the admittedly long sentence in Wikipedia. It lists several vocal groups.
  - spacechild1 4y ago
    I think you completely misread that article...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 4y ago
  >If you ever find yourself about to say that Nixon did something that a non-evil person would do, you’d better triple check your facts. Actually Nixon did several things "a non-evil person would do", Nixon as evil is a carricature. Like giving back Native American lands, or green-lighting the first major environmental protection legislation, or to get talking with China. And of course the Vietnam war itself was escalated by the "good" JFK, and even more so Johnson. Later presidents did things many times worse than Nixon (his Watergate business included) and got off scot-free. But Nixon had an ugly mug, and was an old-style politician, in an era when the boomers were young and "rebellious" and wanted someone more trendy.
swyx 4y ago
also known as the "one percent rule" - 90% of people passively view content, 9% comment on content, 1% create (i've written on it here and how it does favor creators https://www.swyx.io/puwtpd#why-does-this-work-on-them https://www.swyx.io/puwtpd#why-does-this-work-on-them )
- Jensson 4y ago
  I don't think that 10% comments, the numbers I remember are 10% votes and 1% comments. And looking at some random topics it seems to be roughly there, 10% comments is way too high.
- omega3 4y ago
  I'd go further than this and say out of that 1% who create content further 99% shouldn't.
- lytefm 4y ago
  I'd suppose that on a personal level and for HN, activity also changes with experience. I've been passively reading HN for a few years as a junior dev after my team lead introduced the site to my before even creating an account. I've been making comments on a few topics of interest now and then in the past three years. Since a few months I feel like "yeah, I should probably write some docs + blog posts" which might be interesting to other HN readers. I've also noticed that some HN users write a lot of comments to any kind of post whereas others mainly commment on articles related to their are of expertise.
threeseed 4y ago
wiseowise 4y ago
So what’s the point of the article? Because I see a lot discussions and appreciation for the unpopular langs that author mentioned.
dollo_7 4y ago
I may belong to that silent majority. I have learnt a lot from the discussions here in HN and other sites, but I rarely participate on them. This post made me think about being a little more active because, sincerely, most of the times it is just laziness what prevents me from commenting anything. In fact, this is my first comment here in HN. Little by little.
- the_omegist 4y ago
  For me it's more that I think a comment should really "bring something" : a new perspective or a complement of information. That's why there are places on the internet (like here) where, usually, I don't find the usual online fluff content.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- specialist 4y ago
  Not commenting is a superior personal strategy. I've always been the vocal outspoken critic. XML, EJB, annotations, aspects, ORMs, everything JavaScript, agile, ad nauseum. (My non-technical list is way longer.) It's always cost me. I really wish I could tell young me to just smile and STFU.
  - caprock 4y ago
    Are you referring to situations like work, or do you feel that way about the online world as well?
- MexicanJoe 4y ago
  > this is my first comment here in HN. Little by little. Here have an upvote!
- veltas 4y ago
  I will say that in my own experience, if you go against the zeitgeist on HN you can often get by as long as you're sensitive/respectful and intelligent on the issue. There are people who downvote things they disagree with, but I think most people on here downvote people who sound unconstructive or argumentative. And at the end of the day, if you're respectful etc, who cares about being downvoted or having people argue back to you? Just take it on the chin.
kodah 4y ago
> There also seems to be an assumption on HN/Reddit that vocal activity on the internet, in any form — be that videos, blogging, podcasts, etc. — is proportional to activity behind the screen. Personally, I dislike this attitude. I think the internet is a good signal for what will be in the streets in 2-4 years time unabated. The attitude OP reflects is one that was valid in the 90s and early 2000s, but not today.
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  No, I think that's very wrong, now more than ever. What you read "on the internet" is almost always fabricated and published with manipulative intent and asymetric capabilities to promote a product, lang/skill, or whatever. It's the negative comments you should care about.
  - webmobdev 4y ago
    I agree with both of you. There are useful contents indicating trends and there is so much shilling and fake news online. We need somebody to sift through it all - like an honest, ethical media ...
  - the_omegist 4y ago
    Exactly : troll farms, astroturfing and Sock Puppets are a thing. Not being skeptic in 2022 of comments or news online is being very naive.
    - roey2009 4y ago
      I would say, less "naive", and more "to forget". I remember reading about russian bots like eight years ago, the Facebook scandal, and more on the topic once in a while. But. Maintaining vigilance 24/7 is bloody tiring, as any guard/soldier knows. I simply forget. Maybe that's how they get you. They wear you down.
  - kodah 4y ago
    I think you and I may be talking about different things. I do agree with your point that there's lots of hot garbage on the internet. We might as well be doing Olympic laps in it. My point was more at trends in general. If you see something appear on the internet that has even moderate staying power, it will weave its way into society eventually.
verisimilitudes 4y ago
The disgusting natures of UNIX, UTF-8, and the general culture here whose members don't understand that touching a computer (poorly) doesn't entitle them to dominion over the non computer-touchers is generally controversial on orange Reddit.
- dang 4y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382.
- cookieswumchorr 4y ago
  a professional community has the right to a place to communicate among themselves, about things they like and understand. This has nothing to do with dominion
  - verisimilitudes 4y ago
    I'll elaborate. Firstly, this may be a community of "professionals", but that term means something very different for programmers. No "professional" here is an engineer, as an example, because real engineers would be imprisoned and stripped of title for what the typical programmer does. The dominion to which I refer is the fact that many of these "professionals" work for large advertising corporations who encourage them to believe they know better than the people trying to do real work with a computer. They expect their tools to have a price, and then work on tools intended to never be sold, but be rented forever. They touch computers poorly, because out of one side of their mouths do they decry things such as Bitcoin and out of the other they excuse the extreme waste of their corporations and of asinine practices such as embedding an entire WWW browser solely to execute a chat program wastefully. > about things they like and understand They like politics and understand very little about being a hacker, certainly.
    - orwin 4y ago
      Why is this linked to the nature of UTF-8 and Unix? And since you're explaining your thoughts, are those nature the same or is each one a different facet of the programmer culture? And lastly: do you honestly think most production or data engineers should be imprisoned or stripped of their titles?
Cryptonic 4y ago
Mh I've never seen a developer who is not passionate about a few topics. Eventually he's not participating in online discussions, but I think the silent-mayority thinking assumption is plain wrong. Without a good bunch of enthusiasm you cannot do this job well. Moreover without some strong opinions that you are able to voice you just are a puppet of pull request comments and cannot profile yourself in your team.
- CapsAdmin 4y ago
  Most, if not all of the developers I know online are passionate developers, but the majority I met in real life at various work places are not it seems.
allendoerfer 4y ago
Can we flag/correct/remove the article? I am reading this as someone a little too young and too European to yet know much about Nixon, but would prefer if HN could avoid potentially making an idiot out of myself, when talking about recent history.
- tailspin2019 4y ago
  Looks like the author’s corrected it now
actually_a_dog 4y ago
Try criticizing capitalism or "free markets" sometime.
- dang 4y ago
  People do that all the time on HN - I can give you a long list of comments complaining that HN is dominated by socialists, communists, Marxists, you name it. We should distinguish between making substantive anti-market arguments and shrill ideological rhetoric—the latter is going to get downvoted (correctly) regardless of ideology because it's against the site guidelines and the intended spirit of curious conversation - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382.
  - actually_a_dog 4y ago
    > We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382. Well, golly gee, thanks! That's gonna generate some insightful discussion. I don't recall seeing very much thought to the left of Bernie Sanders/AOC on here (which is to say, left of the entire American mainstream). I'll believe that when I see it.
    - dang 4y ago
      Look closer! There are quite a few accounts representing further-left positions on HN. Look up claudiawerner or deanCommie or one or two of the accounts posting in this thread (edit: oops, I meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637686 - got my controversies mixed up). That's no problem as long as they stay within the site guidelines. Indeed, it's good for intellectual diversity. We do our best to protect accounts like that when we see majority prejudices acting unfairly (as well as other minority viewpoints, including strongly disagreeing ones). Of course those politics are less represented on HN than others, but they're less represented in society too. I'd guess they're rather more represented on HN than they are in the population at large, given HN's semi-intellectual orientation. (Only 50% HN users are in the US, btw, last I checked.) As for detaching this subthread- if we aren't going to mark a big-ass ideological meta subthread off topic, I'm not sure what we would. That's one of the most boring, generic, and pointless offtopic tangents there is. (Btw, nearly everyone who makes large claims on that note is completely wrong, because people's perceptions about this are determined by their own pre-existing positions. That's why the question of which way HN is like-totally-biased is decided so differently by every camp. If you want examples, there are dozens at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.)
theteapot 4y ago
PHP is the best.
- Lapsa 4y ago
  that's a good one
uncletaco 4y ago
Besides getting history wrong and eventually making a non-sensical point I'm pretty sure the author is going to point to this thread as some kind of gotcha to confirm their opinion.
oars 4y ago
There are thousands of Java developers in the US who make $80,000 a year and live a fantastic life. No leetcode, no Bay Area, no FAANG. Just people writing the code responsible for our banking, travel, supermarkets and many other systems which underpin our society.
- cutler 4y ago
  $80,000 is hardly the measure of a true professional these days surely?
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    Try looking outside of the USA.
- danwee 4y ago
  I know many developers (over 35 years old) in Europe doing the same (they earn above the average european salary, so like 140K EUR/year or so): Java, no HN, no Linkedin, no FAANG, no leetcode, no switching jobs every 2 years. They have families, they are normal people. If you ask them about monads, they would have no idea (like me) what are you talking about. That's the path I'm heading to (hopefully).
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >they earn above the average european salary, so like 140K EUR/year or so: Java, no HN, no Linkedin, no FAANG, no leetcode, no switching jobs every 2 years Do you have more details about the country and industry? As this is way way above the Java dev salaries in Austria and they'd kill for this kind of money without grinding leetcode. Nobody pays Java devs that kind of money here. Positions like these don't grow on trees and since you say there's no leetcode, Linkedin or big-tech involved, I'm guessing there's other forms of gatekeeping for such a lucrative and easy gig, like having the right industry connections or knowing the right people in order to hear about the openings I would assume, as if they were to advertise this salary on Linkedin or other places they would be drowning in quality applicants, for even less money than that.
StayTrue 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority
kilburn 4y ago
> While browsing HackerNews, [...] you might think that PHP is never used nowadays because whenever it’s mentioned, everyone is hating on it in the comments. This is one of those things that "everyone knows". It may have been true at some point, but it definitely isn't true anymore. The reality is that most discussons here treat PHP fairly, giving it credit where it deserves it and also pointing out its weaknesses. Examples: - (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32325055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32325055 : top comment praising PHP - (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219984 : the top comment is a fairly positive comment overall, without falling into zealotry. - (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917655 : the top comment is someone praising Laravel and the "modern" approach to php. The general feeling is that PHP got some things right (shared-nothing), doesn't offer anything particularly unique but is surprisingly effective in reality.
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
I’d argue people greatly underestimate confinement by the Status Quo, or producing what stakeholders asked for... rather than what they needed. As an engineer one may have opinions about how things should be done, but in reality it is often not really your call if you are just an employee. Put another way, if you are not listening to the person who signs the checks, than your career will be rather short. "Nor would a wise man, seeing that he was in a hole, go to work and blindly dig it deeper..." (The Washington Post October 25, 1911)
nonrandomstring 4y ago
I think what the author says is true. The mass of digital workers use older, established and unfashionable technology, and are neither vocal nor particularly curious about the work. But there's an implication of moral purity at play. Are those who just quietly "mind their own business" a good, wholesome but misrepresented group? On the contrary, I think that in matters with far reaching consequences, which computing is, silent majorities are the problem. Unreflectively going along with the programme becomes a kind of passive negligence which should not be lionised in a folksy way.
- ThinkBeat 4y ago
  The insane race to adopt any fad to be cool, is a mindset I find far worse morally than using tried and true tools. It enhances risk. The latest tool language and/or framework is uncharted territory A tried-and-true solution has had a lot of bugs and issues documented and some of them solved. It also mean the team must take a break from development to learn whatever the new thing is. Some will need more time than other, which may slow it down even further. A lot of systems are developed in domains where "go fast and break things", A/B testing etc. would not be at all advisable. The main selfish focus on "adopt whatever is hip this week" is to pad resumes with it, consultant can come in to help train people $$$. Consultants will fight for it to use the newest and greatest since it may increased development time $$$.
  - tdeck 4y ago
    This is a false dichotomy though. Your comment makes it sound like the only options are to keep using the same tech stack for 30 years or to "race" to adopt the "newest fad". What about switching from a moribund 30 year old technology to a mature 5-10 year old technology every now and then, based on an assessment of the very real drawbacks of living in the past. Security is one of the biggest problems with outdated software that many people are only too happy to ignore.
    - wellokthen2 4y ago
      Protip: you're much better off writing something in straight C than in [latest fad language du jour]
Lapsa 4y ago
with all the banning, down-voting and cancel culture in general - it's just not worth it. why should I even care if the receiving part isn't listening, got different agenda (yet another celebrity cult buildup || greed)? heck... the youth doesn't even know how to swear anymore. n word this, r word that - as if Lord Voldemort's gonna pop in. internet has created an illusion that teachers have become obsolete, even at work I refuse to criticize co-workers as it's not my job to evaluate them.
- eh2beifhe 4y ago
  What is your point? Are you saying you can't advocate for different tech stacks without using the n word?
  - Lapsa 4y ago
    already said it. point is - *it's not worth it*. placed a small bait and that's pretty much all you took away from the post. why even bother? it's much easier to live w/o giving a crap that random dude from the interwebz might assume I'm a racist. unless you are an established public figure with bunch of sheep dancing around - exactly this is always the response. snarkiness, down votes, timeouts, public shaming. then I tell them to go fuck themselves and they ban me from their useless community. never ending bitching on stackoverflow about what's a duplicate and what's not. ending with KEKW
    - pohl 4y ago
      I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the concept of persona non grata predates the internet.
      - Lapsa 4y ago
        internet used to be different
        pohl 4y ago
        the only constant is change
jongjong 4y ago
I used to be part of the silent majority of software developers but that changed after I became disillusioned about the direction of the industry. Nowadays, I'm basically forced to use certain inefficient tools in order to get a job because a bunch of highly vocal junior devs who got their way. It's a bit like in politics; when times are good for the majority, most normal people aren't interested in politics; they have better things to do; this apathy makes it easier for freaks to get power and start messing with things... Until it gets so bad that regular people start noticing and begrudgingly getting involved in politics.
- specialist 4y ago
  FWIW, every generation feels this way. Older me is now super embarrassed by my prior enthusiasm for object oriented programming and misc methodologies. I have very vivid memories of grey beards dismissing my naivety and me thinking "they just didn't get it." [0] If there's any kind of karma, today's noobs will live long enough to be mocked by even younger noobs. Small solace, I know. [0] I always remember criticisms. I've got the voice of doubt in the back of my head always wondering what I'm missing, what if they're right, etc. It's a serious bummer.
  - wainstead 4y ago
    > I've got the voice of doubt in the back of my head always wondering what I'm missing, what if they're right, etc. It's a serious bummer. There's probably a saying somewhere along the lines of "There are two kinds of programmers: those who admit they get Imposter's Syndrome, and those who are too afraid to admit it." We all have those doubts. I've been in this since... what, 1994 professionally I suppose, and I still have doubts. It's totally normal. IS is not limited to software development either.
- donatj 4y ago
  I am regularly up at night in a cold sweat worrying about how if I suddenly needed to find a new job I’d have to learn some sort of front end JavaScript framework.
mkl95 4y ago
> But let’s be straight, that’s like 1% of all of the developers out there — the rest of them are just lurking and coding with their language of choice and being content with it. Be it Fortran, COBOL, Perl, or PHP. Assuming all developers who are using something like COBOL or Perl are content with it is hilarious. It doesn't really get much worse than something like COBOL or Perl in terms of ergonomics and ease of use.
- biztos 4y ago
  As a once and, who knows, maybe future Perl dev I find it a weird choice of grouping, no disrespect to Fortran, but I also think there are probably quite a few mature Perl codebases tended by mature Perl programmers who have their ergonomics and ease of use very dialed-in. Whether you would enjoy it is a different question, but my impression from years of doing Perl is that the most committed hackers tuned their environments and organized their projects just so, and would laugh at anybody else’s idea of “ergonomics.”
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Php had pretty good docs online. COBOL presumably has good docs (though I think it’s a bad example and not used much). Perl used to have a thriving online community so it seems pretty conceivable to me that people could like the language. And CPAN still exists and is full of reasonably practical packages for doing lots of reasonable things, as well as packages like marpa which don’t really have equivalents outside of Perl.
- msla 4y ago
  I like Perl for small codebases heavily focused on manipulating text. It has first-class support for regular expressions, which means you can make them more readable in addition to doing more things with them more conveniently, and it largely stays out of my way. COBOL, on the other hand, is a domain-specific language for a domain most people here have no experience with: Software involving fixed-format input and fixed-point numerical calculations. It would be amazing if some language integrated a clear way to describe modern, recursively-defined input formats with the same degree of language support COBOL has for its data definition language. Go is still too verbose, sadly. Fortran suffers from FORTRAN, by which I mean if you mention Fortran to people they think of 1960s-era mainframe software with no string support, column-oriented fixed formatting, and GOTO use by people who'd never even heard of Dijkstra. Modern Fortran is not like that; sadly, much like Lisp, they never changed the name, so old ideas linger. (This is also true of Cobol.)
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donatj 4y ago
> Sometimes I’ve seen Pull Requests from empty accounts with a brief explanation of what was implemented. They just submit bug fixes, no drama. Over half my coworkers including some very talented developers have no public repos. As someone with almost 200 that always blows my mind. How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest question on my part. I want to understand.
- astura 4y ago
  >How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest question on my part. I want to understand. Because most people (myself included, 16 yrs professional experience) don't want to do unpaid work outside of work hours. How do you not understand that?
- innocentoldguy 4y ago
  I don’t have any public repos because I’d much rather spend my personal time with my family doing non-work things. I think it just comes down to what you value in your personal time. For some people, it is coding. For others, it isn’t. Neither is good or bad.
- dceddia 4y ago
  It sounds like you're starting with the assumption that if someone writes software to fill a hole of theirs, that they would almost certainly make it public. I don't think that's true for everyone.
- wnolens 4y ago
  I'm literally paid not to.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Great salespeople aren’t expected to run lemonade stands after work. “You’re so good at sales, how come you don’t want to sell something in the evening? There must be something you’re itching to sell to your neighbors.” Software engineers seem unique among professionals that you’re expected to maintain a hobbyist body of work that’s also your professional calling card.
gettingitdone 4y ago
I am probably part of the silent majority, at least until this comment. Be aware that my comment is focused on business. What you do as a hobby or a side project is out of scope. The debate around languages often focus on syntax differences, as if they alone would make a huge difference. We need to consider the eco system as a whole. Many have probably read the "blub paradox". The context of that article is his experience from building a product in the late nineties, when the eco system was so much smaller than what we have today. In a world where you have to invent your own frameworks and libraries to get things done, the article makes sense. I don't doubt that you will benefit from a powerful language, when you need to make something truly novel. Today we are in a completely different solution where 90% of web startups should use one of the existing frameworks and libraries to build upon, rather than making your own. It's basic "plumbing" compared to what we used to do 20 years ago. For the remaining 10% where they need to (re)invent a database or framework, a powerful language may have advantages when your product is mostly code. Another tendency caused by the bubble effect of HN/Reddit, is that many move on to different languages and is left with their impression of a language as it was years ago when they last used it. One good example of this is Java. If you asked me 10 years ago, I would say that Java had stagnated. If you ask me today, I will tell you of all the improvements that have been made and many more planned. A lot of the arguments against Java is based on old articles and experiences that are no longer valid. I am also wondering if some of the dislike is also caused by many learning it in school in an environment that has little to do with real work, but that is a different rant. I'm not saying Java is the coolest language out there, but the massive amount of open source and battle tested frameworks like Quarkus and Spring is a differentiator. I would argue that the "Blub paradox" of yesterday should be replaced with a "Bubble paradox", where the real work is done by pragmatic developers who use an ok language with an excellent eco system. It is sometimes frustrating to read articles about startups who clearly should have chosen better. Everything is fine in the beginning, and they write blog posts about the success they had which is circulated within the bubble. After some time they need to scale up and implement functionality that is not supported well in their eco system. They then spend time on solving problems that seem novel to them, but is basically a solved problem in a more mature eco system. Instead of growing the product, they are forced to spend time on the "glue". To paraphrase Breaking Bad: Are we in the money business, or the programming business? If I have to bet on two startups, where one uses the latest bubble language and the other Java, I would bet on Java in 90% of the cases. I know that they will get things done. Perhaps even modern PHP would be preferable.
kkfx 4y ago
Well... Silent majority also means the mass of people who do not contribute to the society except for they use as meat-based weapons in politics, religion... Yes they have a value, for some it's the same value of a flock of cows: munging meat, milk etc. For some a hope or absence thereof for the humanity. IN history unfortunately the former tend to win all the time...
- eh2beifhe 4y ago
  So how does this apply to software then? Why are silent people in the software industry "meat based weapons" and what for?
  - kkfx 4y ago
    "software" does not means only developers, PMs and code monkeys, but also "moderators" for GAFAM and their Chinese/Russian counterparts, who normally happen to be very stressed and little paid censors, i.e. meat-based weapons against their own co-Citizens. But also those who act a bit like code monkeys to develop common crapware so many use, mostly in web and business crapware etc. They all contribute to DESTROY IT and civilization together. I just only suggest a thought: did you noticed how many now can't use pen&papers properly for instance to write something a bit more long and complex than a quick few words note? Well, there is nothing wrong in that IF they know to do the same with some other mean... The issue is that they do not equally know how to do on a computer. Actually we have even lawyers unable to format a decent letter without a template on a computer or by pen&paper. I call them skilled illiterate... And that's not only about a letter, for diagrams, simple drawing it's the same. Most can't even IMAGING doing something like humans have done on paper 10+ years ago with a software, they can't imaging having in a unique documents some text, formulas, a plot, an email etc. They are so trained that you need a different program for anything (because that's good for business) that they feel the WOW effect just seeing a modern limited and limiting "notebook UI". Some colleagues (sysadmins and some devs) have a similar effects seeing me with Emacs, many at first demo act like children in front of something new that seem magic to their eyes. That's is.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
Indeed silence. During market research, looking for potential developers who would use our developer tools is difficult. Keep asking myself where are these guys? Tech twitter is literally javascript thingy echo chamber. Reddit is newbie marketplace with a lot of bias advice for beginners. HN is like ok boomer who don't buy anything. This is my perception.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
It's not just that they are silent, most of them don't even speak English that well; or at all. And they build a lot of software. And they are all over the world. Any tech stack that ever mattered, there are still countless of people using working with that on a daily basis. There are a lot of developers out there, tens of millions. That little bubble of users actually commenting on HN is tiny in comparison. So, yes it's good to be aware of that and appreciate the world is bigger than that. At the same time, like with politics, just because they are silent does not mean they don't have opinions. And they vote. With their feet. They'll adopt practices, tools, and technology they like or need and walk away from other things.
etothepii 4y ago
> First of all, when you're vocal, you're more likely to be heard. Why is being heard a good thing? When I was at school I was the insufferable kid who always put their hand up as I knew the answer. Thinking somehow that the teacher wanted to know the answer. What I learned as I grew up is a lesson learned is better than a lesson told.
Barrin92 4y ago
made me think of a thread here recently, can't remember which one exactly, that had the general tone of "who even develops on Windows?". People in the .Net ecosystem at least it seems like are very underrepresented here given how large of a platform that is.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  There are "arcane" development communities that are far less engaged in "social programming". The Basic Community is quite large as well and I think I have never met a developer on the net. .net is even larger but increasingly the community seems to withdraw as well. As someone who formerly developed on that platform I wonder where they exchange themselves nowadays. I know quite a few companies that develop on .net, mainly in C# instead of Basic of course. But I rarely see any discussions about it. Wouldn't know where to ask in-depth technical questions.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Stackoverflow (and its offshoots) is pretty .NET heavy, perhaps unsurprisingly given its heritage.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
Reminds me of a story that was linked from here, a few years ago[0]. Places like this, get caught up in “shiny,” and that doesn’t always reflect reality. For example, it is fashionable, hereabout, to throw shade on PHP. I present Exhibit A, the “Fishtank Graph”[1]. We were just discussing something similar, yesterday, in the SwiftUI thread[2]. [0] https://vickiboykis.com/2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/ https://vickiboykis.com/2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/ [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming_language/ms/y https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32631219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32631219
mikewarot 4y ago
There is a tendency towards proactive change here on HN, which is fine with this old retired programmer. I'm all for making new systems that utilize all that's been learned since the 1960s. What I'm NOT in favor of is the disrespect of legacy. There are millions of systems out there in the world in manufacturing environments. These systems are ancient, I worked in a shop making gears for 5 years. The CNC lathe we used had a GE computer running it from 1970, and it used mylar punched tape to store programs. It was a huge investment when it was purchased, and there was an old guy (about 70) who they called for repairs on it and much of the other ancient hardware. This shop had 6 employees, including me. At it's peak, there were 50 or so, during and after the Viet Nam war. That hardware was sooooo old, but it still worked, reliably turning out the same few types of shafts and other parts we need to turn into gears and splines and other gear shaped objects (like turbine blades). The programmer in me desperately wanted to keep the lathe, the motor, and just replace the control system with GRBL, but even if that was free, and worked the first time, the risk that an upgrade represented was completely unacceptable. When you're in a job shop, there are parts you've been making for a generation in small quantities (less than 500). Those parts are relied upon by other businesses as part of their product. If you "upgrade" any part of your process, you risk producing a part which doesn't work somewhere down the supply chain. If you make that happen too many times, you'll lose your customers. It's also important to know that gear cutting was only a step in the production chain... we didn't start from raw materials most of the time, we were given a "blank" on which to cut teeth, that already had many operations performed on it. It was almost never just a matter of sawing off a new piece of metal and starting over. You had to respect the work already put into a gear blank, or shaft to cut splines on. The incentives in manufacturing are strongly against any type of change. However, they aren't blindly obeyed. If there are new jobs, then it's reasonable to try out the new machines or new systems in those cases. If something can cut the cost of a part by half, then it might be worth the risk, if the customer approves a change. Please don't think that those in the silent majority of the world are un-reflective of the needs for security and other patches... but if things break every Wednesday, they'll disable Windows Updates forever, for very good reason.
Karen48 4y ago
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heisenbit 4y ago
Being vocal or silent - does this matter as long as one does not listen first?
3pt14159 4y ago
Some things I'm silent about, other things I'm not. Articles like this often fail to differentiate that there usually isn't one large blob of people that are chatty about all the things all the time. Usually individuals have their own specific issues that they're interested in and passionate about and will default to the consensus or be fine with any option for the rest of it.
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keithalewis 4y ago
"There are so many articles and comments by people whose level of enthusiasm doesn't match their experience." Bingo!
avgcorrection 4y ago
It’s surprising to me that the Silent Majority is still brought up with such a connection to Nixon considering - WaterGate - The reputation of the Vietnam War - The good things that came out of the counterculture like the Civil Rights Movement
ksec 4y ago
>While browsing HackerNews, I sometimes get the feeling that every developer out there is working for FAANG Bubbles on HN; Entry level Web Developers are getting $200K per year working in FAANG or Big Tech. Non-FANNG are getting $150K anyway. Ruby may be dead, but PHP is even more dead. Java may rule the enterprise, but you should not mention Java. No one uses Oracle or MySQL, why would you want that? Postgres is the only DB forward. Everything should be Remote. Communication should always be Async. Oh, Ada is the second Forbidden Fruit on HN. Facebook is...... OK I guess we shouldn't go there. USB-C will solve all cabling problems. Everything should be USB-C. 5G is useless. AV1 and AVIF. The video and image standard to rule them all. Nothing should be centralised. Everything should be distributed. Finally, The unwritten rule of HN. You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet.
- stopyellingatme 4y ago
  Nailed it.
- temphnaccount 4y ago
  These are still non controversial. Controversial bubbles on HN are: * Everything should be free and open source. Just because small portion of the HN can donate to their favorite projects, everyone should run on donations. Ads are forbidden on the internet. No internet business should be a profitable company. * Tiring and useless interview process designed by FAANG etc is no way a farce and a totally justified practice (some version of Stockholm syndrome there) * Private companies should not interfere in the politics/internal matter of another country. (This view quickly changes when they see the negative effect of same companies in their own country) * YC is the best and the most exclusive startup accelerator/incubator in the world. If you got accepted in YC, you have won in life.
  - CSMastermind 4y ago
    > * Tiring and useless interview process designed by FAANG etc is no way a farce and a totally justified practice (some version of Stockholm syndrome there) I'd say it's the opposite. The view you're expressing: that the standard software interview process is somehow "useless" strikes me as a bubble here. I'd wager most people not on hackernews don't hold your view.
roeles 4y ago
I wonder... in a world where everybody talks... Who is listening? It's not as if the world lacks ideas or opinions. If anything, we lack wisdom.

291 points by bndr 4y ago

Thanks for the article. I do feel like engineers who put themselves out there and engage on HN, Github, Chat groups, etc, get "polished" and get better as engineers, assuming that association in these forums causes them to read more code or think about paradigms. If "silent" are mostly keeping to themselves, they might have some of their own innovations independent from mainstream engineering, but lack common knowledge, which can be accounted for by reading a lot of programming books, release notes, docs, etc. Unrelated, some unsolicited feedback for bloggers, I like to click on images to zoom in (quicker than ctrl+equal 5 times). So at the very least please wrap the images in a link to the image src. a humble request.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
It's possible to read on the internet without engaging in arguments.
- devmunchies 4y ago
  I know :). That's why I was unambiguously grateful for the article and polite in my humble request.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    I was responding to the idea that the silent majority lacks common knowledge by default.
kixiQu 4y ago
> Unrelated, some unsolicited feedback for bloggers, I like to click on images to zoom in (quicker than ctrl+equal 5 times). So at the very least please wrap the images in a link to the image src. a humble request. I suggest using a TamperMonkey script to accomplish this on your end; outside of thumbnail galleries, it runs against common expectations, so you'll have better luck taking control yourself.

googlryas 4y ago

Don't forget the silent majority in FANGs either. A lot of us aren't working on crazy machine learning models, were just copying protobufs from one form to another.

fragmede 4y ago
Could be worse, could be GCL or borgmon.

politelemon 4y ago

I'm surprised no mention of this very topic from ten years ago. Dark matter developers. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-unseen-99 https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...

ttgurney 4y ago

> They do not participate in controversial discussions about Visual Basic or Pascal — they just do their work in those languages without even knowing that there’s so much controversy surrounding their language of choice. Serious question: are these languages actually controversial? Doesn't "controversy" usually mean people holding strong opinions and frequently disagreeing? I rarely hear anything at all about Pascal or Visual Basic. Maybe they were controversial in the 1990s? Now I'd call them merely unfashionable.

wainstead 4y ago
Perhaps OP meant Pascal programmers arguing among themselves, rather than arguing with anti-Pascal programmers? I'd expect such a smallish community of developers to find plenty of common grown in such a stable technology, so no need to throw stones.

kasajian 4y ago

"Visual Basic or Pascal"? Is this written in early 90s?

heywire 4y ago
I work for a large financial services company who still maintains software written in both VB (6) and Pascal (well, Delphi).

wenbin 4y ago

* Making money from your own project is bad. You shouldn't put ads or charge a SaaS fee from your own project / startup / small business. But it's okay to be well paid by a FAANG as an employee. * "I can build this over a weekend." - when someone posts their own project here * "I don't understand why they need to hire so many people" - when learning that a tiny app (e.g., Twitter, Uber) has thousands employees.

bpmayer 4y ago

This original silent majority was a victim of Soviet propaganda. Nothing is better in war when the enemy no longer wants to fight because he has self-doubt.

thrown_22 4y ago

>And that’s fine, we’re all amateurs, and sometimes we can be wrong. I'm not an amateur. Or if I am than everyone is too since I have written software for project that would kill tens of thousands if it fails. Other than that the vocal minority was always my opinion on Rust. A small core of true believers who decided that convincing people they should change the world is worth more than actually doing any work in Rust.

verisimilitudes 4y ago
Such a saying is what the incompetent obsessively repeat to themselves. They can't stand by the thought of people who don't need an Internet connection to program, who don't copy and paste from the fools over at StackOverflow, and the many other things they do which their betters don't. The fools over at Reddit call some things "adulting", because the idea of growing out of childhood is so foreign to them that they'd rather make it childish too. It's the same basic disease.
- tailspin2019 4y ago
  > we’re all amateurs, and sometimes we can be wrong. > Such a saying is what the incompetent obsessively repeat to themselves. I'll take humble over arrogant.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    Being humble is saying "I'm an amateur" saying "Everyone is an amateur" is the opposite of humble.
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    There’s difference between being humble and insecure. Generally people who repeat that mantra are trying to guard themselves by “we’re all fools”veil from any critique.

Transfinity 4y ago

> The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. Excuse me? The "silent majority" was the set of Americans who were for the war, not (loudly) protesting against it. Nixon was all for continuing the war.

freddie_mercury 4y ago
That's literally what it says in the very next sentence. "In this usage, it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time"
- astura 4y ago
  It was stealthily changed. Someone else quoted the original further down in the comments > The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. He spoke to the people who were not actively voicing their opinions and who were overshadowed by the vocal few who were supporting the war.
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throwawaylmtn 4y ago

Can we please stop supporting political operations like BLM, MAGA, and political parties in software. I am tired of every open source project asking for donations to BLM. Uyghurs matter too.

wellokthen2 4y ago

silisili 4y ago

> Usually, the comments on HN/Reddit are polarised by a single group of people who have the same opinion, Can't speak for Reddit, but that's not at all the case here. For example, I often speak of my hatred of microservices here. I'll get some upvotes and agreement, some people telling me it's a dumb opinion, and some people telling me we're doing it wrong and explain their right way. Believe it or not, I learn a lot from different people and their experiences. I can't think of a single topic that seems to be prevelant here that doesn't have a sizeable amount of disagreement, in fact. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

politelemon 4y ago
> but that's not at all the case here. Very sorry but it absolutely is the case here. Your anecdotal data is limited to you, but HN very much operates as a hive mind, it just hides it better. Considering this place to be "superior" to other places only leads to complacence and further strengthens the echo chamber.
- deleted 4y ago
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- timeon 4y ago
  > HN very much operates as a hive mind Most of us here agree with you.
jrm4 4y ago
It's getting better, but e.g. try talking about race.
jonshariat 4y ago
I think your experience actually proves the point and touches on why many dangerous and crazy POV have also been getting so much air time in the news. Let's say you have 2 opposing POV: A or B "A" has a silent majority so only 5 of the 5,000 people post a comment about A being the right POV. "B" is a passionate minority so 5 of the 50 people post a comment about B being the right POV. To the viewer, it looks like a balanced discussion and a topic open to much debate, both sides have equal voice but in reality "A" is by far the most accepted position.

ttpphd 4y ago

There's nothing quite like an author getting basic history completely wrong at the very beginning. Really builds confidence.

drewcoo 4y ago
Do you mean the paragraph that was lifted almost verbatim from the first paragraph of this Wikipedia page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority
- ttpphd 4y ago
  Oh bless your heart
hot_gril 4y ago
And it's even the title of the article.
lvturner 4y ago
What color is the bike-shed?
- ttpphd 4y ago
  The actual silent majority was a violent, reactionary, prowar group led by Nixon. They were not anti war, and they were not silent. The comparison the author made is an incredibly bad analogy, at least to anyone who actually understands reality.
- quietbritishjim 4y ago
  If the colour of the bike shed is in the name of your nuclear reactor, maybe it actually does matter.
trasz 4y ago
Nixon’s internal politics isn’t “basic history” anywhere except US.

evan_ 4y ago

> The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. He spoke to the people who were not actively voicing their opinions and who were overshadowed by the vocal few who were supporting the war. This is a shocking misunderstanding of history. The “silent majority” Nixon spoke of were folks opposed to anti-war protests. Nixon intentionally prolonged the war for political gain- killing additional thousands of people. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nixon-prolonged-vietnam-war-for-political-gainand-johnson-knew-about-it-newly-unclassified-tapes-suggest-3595441/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nixon-prolonged-vi... If you ever find yourself about to say that Nixon did something that a non-evil person would do, you’d better triple check your facts.

bndr 4y ago
Fixed it. Thank you :) Just took the quote directly from Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority#:~:text=The%20term%20was%20popularized%20by,the%20large%20demonstrations%20against%20the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority#:~:text=The%20...
- olau 4y ago
  Just to save time for other people who might be wondering how Wikipedia could get this wrong, bndr seems to have forgotten to read the last part of the admittedly long sentence in Wikipedia. It lists several vocal groups.
- spacechild1 4y ago
  I think you completely misread that article...
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coldtea 4y ago
>If you ever find yourself about to say that Nixon did something that a non-evil person would do, you’d better triple check your facts. Actually Nixon did several things "a non-evil person would do", Nixon as evil is a carricature. Like giving back Native American lands, or green-lighting the first major environmental protection legislation, or to get talking with China. And of course the Vietnam war itself was escalated by the "good" JFK, and even more so Johnson. Later presidents did things many times worse than Nixon (his Watergate business included) and got off scot-free. But Nixon had an ugly mug, and was an old-style politician, in an era when the boomers were young and "rebellious" and wanted someone more trendy.

swyx 4y ago

also known as the "one percent rule" - 90% of people passively view content, 9% comment on content, 1% create (i've written on it here and how it does favor creators https://www.swyx.io/puwtpd#why-does-this-work-on-them https://www.swyx.io/puwtpd#why-does-this-work-on-them )

Jensson 4y ago
I don't think that 10% comments, the numbers I remember are 10% votes and 1% comments. And looking at some random topics it seems to be roughly there, 10% comments is way too high.
omega3 4y ago
I'd go further than this and say out of that 1% who create content further 99% shouldn't.
lytefm 4y ago
I'd suppose that on a personal level and for HN, activity also changes with experience. I've been passively reading HN for a few years as a junior dev after my team lead introduced the site to my before even creating an account. I've been making comments on a few topics of interest now and then in the past three years. Since a few months I feel like "yeah, I should probably write some docs + blog posts" which might be interesting to other HN readers. I've also noticed that some HN users write a lot of comments to any kind of post whereas others mainly commment on articles related to their are of expertise.

threeseed 4y ago

wiseowise 4y ago

So what’s the point of the article? Because I see a lot discussions and appreciation for the unpopular langs that author mentioned.

dollo_7 4y ago

I may belong to that silent majority. I have learnt a lot from the discussions here in HN and other sites, but I rarely participate on them. This post made me think about being a little more active because, sincerely, most of the times it is just laziness what prevents me from commenting anything. In fact, this is my first comment here in HN. Little by little.

the_omegist 4y ago
For me it's more that I think a comment should really "bring something" : a new perspective or a complement of information. That's why there are places on the internet (like here) where, usually, I don't find the usual online fluff content.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
specialist 4y ago
Not commenting is a superior personal strategy. I've always been the vocal outspoken critic. XML, EJB, annotations, aspects, ORMs, everything JavaScript, agile, ad nauseum. (My non-technical list is way longer.) It's always cost me. I really wish I could tell young me to just smile and STFU.
- caprock 4y ago
  Are you referring to situations like work, or do you feel that way about the online world as well?
MexicanJoe 4y ago
> this is my first comment here in HN. Little by little. Here have an upvote!
veltas 4y ago
I will say that in my own experience, if you go against the zeitgeist on HN you can often get by as long as you're sensitive/respectful and intelligent on the issue. There are people who downvote things they disagree with, but I think most people on here downvote people who sound unconstructive or argumentative. And at the end of the day, if you're respectful etc, who cares about being downvoted or having people argue back to you? Just take it on the chin.

kodah 4y ago

> There also seems to be an assumption on HN/Reddit that vocal activity on the internet, in any form — be that videos, blogging, podcasts, etc. — is proportional to activity behind the screen. Personally, I dislike this attitude. I think the internet is a good signal for what will be in the streets in 2-4 years time unabated. The attitude OP reflects is one that was valid in the 90s and early 2000s, but not today.

tannhaeuser 4y ago
No, I think that's very wrong, now more than ever. What you read "on the internet" is almost always fabricated and published with manipulative intent and asymetric capabilities to promote a product, lang/skill, or whatever. It's the negative comments you should care about.
- webmobdev 4y ago
  I agree with both of you. There are useful contents indicating trends and there is so much shilling and fake news online. We need somebody to sift through it all - like an honest, ethical media ...
- the_omegist 4y ago
  Exactly : troll farms, astroturfing and Sock Puppets are a thing. Not being skeptic in 2022 of comments or news online is being very naive.
  - roey2009 4y ago
    I would say, less "naive", and more "to forget". I remember reading about russian bots like eight years ago, the Facebook scandal, and more on the topic once in a while. But. Maintaining vigilance 24/7 is bloody tiring, as any guard/soldier knows. I simply forget. Maybe that's how they get you. They wear you down.
- kodah 4y ago
  I think you and I may be talking about different things. I do agree with your point that there's lots of hot garbage on the internet. We might as well be doing Olympic laps in it. My point was more at trends in general. If you see something appear on the internet that has even moderate staying power, it will weave its way into society eventually.

verisimilitudes 4y ago

The disgusting natures of UNIX, UTF-8, and the general culture here whose members don't understand that touching a computer (poorly) doesn't entitle them to dominion over the non computer-touchers is generally controversial on orange Reddit.

dang 4y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382.
cookieswumchorr 4y ago
a professional community has the right to a place to communicate among themselves, about things they like and understand. This has nothing to do with dominion
- verisimilitudes 4y ago
  I'll elaborate. Firstly, this may be a community of "professionals", but that term means something very different for programmers. No "professional" here is an engineer, as an example, because real engineers would be imprisoned and stripped of title for what the typical programmer does. The dominion to which I refer is the fact that many of these "professionals" work for large advertising corporations who encourage them to believe they know better than the people trying to do real work with a computer. They expect their tools to have a price, and then work on tools intended to never be sold, but be rented forever. They touch computers poorly, because out of one side of their mouths do they decry things such as Bitcoin and out of the other they excuse the extreme waste of their corporations and of asinine practices such as embedding an entire WWW browser solely to execute a chat program wastefully. > about things they like and understand They like politics and understand very little about being a hacker, certainly.
  - orwin 4y ago
    Why is this linked to the nature of UTF-8 and Unix? And since you're explaining your thoughts, are those nature the same or is each one a different facet of the programmer culture? And lastly: do you honestly think most production or data engineers should be imprisoned or stripped of their titles?

Cryptonic 4y ago

Mh I've never seen a developer who is not passionate about a few topics. Eventually he's not participating in online discussions, but I think the silent-mayority thinking assumption is plain wrong. Without a good bunch of enthusiasm you cannot do this job well. Moreover without some strong opinions that you are able to voice you just are a puppet of pull request comments and cannot profile yourself in your team.

CapsAdmin 4y ago
Most, if not all of the developers I know online are passionate developers, but the majority I met in real life at various work places are not it seems.

allendoerfer 4y ago

Can we flag/correct/remove the article? I am reading this as someone a little too young and too European to yet know much about Nixon, but would prefer if HN could avoid potentially making an idiot out of myself, when talking about recent history.

tailspin2019 4y ago
Looks like the author’s corrected it now

actually_a_dog 4y ago

Try criticizing capitalism or "free markets" sometime.

dang 4y ago
People do that all the time on HN - I can give you a long list of comments complaining that HN is dominated by socialists, communists, Marxists, you name it. We should distinguish between making substantive anti-market arguments and shrill ideological rhetoric—the latter is going to get downvoted (correctly) regardless of ideology because it's against the site guidelines and the intended spirit of curious conversation - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  > We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635382. Well, golly gee, thanks! That's gonna generate some insightful discussion. I don't recall seeing very much thought to the left of Bernie Sanders/AOC on here (which is to say, left of the entire American mainstream). I'll believe that when I see it.
  - dang 4y ago
    Look closer! There are quite a few accounts representing further-left positions on HN. Look up claudiawerner or deanCommie or one or two of the accounts posting in this thread (edit: oops, I meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637686 - got my controversies mixed up). That's no problem as long as they stay within the site guidelines. Indeed, it's good for intellectual diversity. We do our best to protect accounts like that when we see majority prejudices acting unfairly (as well as other minority viewpoints, including strongly disagreeing ones). Of course those politics are less represented on HN than others, but they're less represented in society too. I'd guess they're rather more represented on HN than they are in the population at large, given HN's semi-intellectual orientation. (Only 50% HN users are in the US, btw, last I checked.) As for detaching this subthread- if we aren't going to mark a big-ass ideological meta subthread off topic, I'm not sure what we would. That's one of the most boring, generic, and pointless offtopic tangents there is. (Btw, nearly everyone who makes large claims on that note is completely wrong, because people's perceptions about this are determined by their own pre-existing positions. That's why the question of which way HN is like-totally-biased is decided so differently by every camp. If you want examples, there are dozens at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.)

theteapot 4y ago

PHP is the best.

Lapsa 4y ago
that's a good one

uncletaco 4y ago

Besides getting history wrong and eventually making a non-sensical point I'm pretty sure the author is going to point to this thread as some kind of gotcha to confirm their opinion.

oars 4y ago

There are thousands of Java developers in the US who make $80,000 a year and live a fantastic life. No leetcode, no Bay Area, no FAANG. Just people writing the code responsible for our banking, travel, supermarkets and many other systems which underpin our society.

cutler 4y ago
$80,000 is hardly the measure of a true professional these days surely?
- pdimitar 4y ago
  Try looking outside of the USA.
danwee 4y ago
I know many developers (over 35 years old) in Europe doing the same (they earn above the average european salary, so like 140K EUR/year or so): Java, no HN, no Linkedin, no FAANG, no leetcode, no switching jobs every 2 years. They have families, they are normal people. If you ask them about monads, they would have no idea (like me) what are you talking about. That's the path I'm heading to (hopefully).
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >they earn above the average european salary, so like 140K EUR/year or so: Java, no HN, no Linkedin, no FAANG, no leetcode, no switching jobs every 2 years Do you have more details about the country and industry? As this is way way above the Java dev salaries in Austria and they'd kill for this kind of money without grinding leetcode. Nobody pays Java devs that kind of money here. Positions like these don't grow on trees and since you say there's no leetcode, Linkedin or big-tech involved, I'm guessing there's other forms of gatekeeping for such a lucrative and easy gig, like having the right industry connections or knowing the right people in order to hear about the openings I would assume, as if they were to advertise this salary on Linkedin or other places they would be drowning in quality applicants, for even less money than that.

StayTrue 4y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority

kilburn 4y ago

> While browsing HackerNews, [...] you might think that PHP is never used nowadays because whenever it’s mentioned, everyone is hating on it in the comments. This is one of those things that "everyone knows". It may have been true at some point, but it definitely isn't true anymore. The reality is that most discussons here treat PHP fairly, giving it credit where it deserves it and also pointing out its weaknesses. Examples: - (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32325055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32325055 : top comment praising PHP - (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219984 : the top comment is a fairly positive comment overall, without falling into zealotry. - (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917655 : the top comment is someone praising Laravel and the "modern" approach to php. The general feeling is that PHP got some things right (shared-nothing), doesn't offer anything particularly unique but is surprisingly effective in reality.

Joel_Mckay 4y ago

I’d argue people greatly underestimate confinement by the Status Quo, or producing what stakeholders asked for... rather than what they needed. As an engineer one may have opinions about how things should be done, but in reality it is often not really your call if you are just an employee. Put another way, if you are not listening to the person who signs the checks, than your career will be rather short. "Nor would a wise man, seeing that he was in a hole, go to work and blindly dig it deeper..." (The Washington Post October 25, 1911)

nonrandomstring 4y ago

I think what the author says is true. The mass of digital workers use older, established and unfashionable technology, and are neither vocal nor particularly curious about the work. But there's an implication of moral purity at play. Are those who just quietly "mind their own business" a good, wholesome but misrepresented group? On the contrary, I think that in matters with far reaching consequences, which computing is, silent majorities are the problem. Unreflectively going along with the programme becomes a kind of passive negligence which should not be lionised in a folksy way.

ThinkBeat 4y ago
The insane race to adopt any fad to be cool, is a mindset I find far worse morally than using tried and true tools. It enhances risk. The latest tool language and/or framework is uncharted territory A tried-and-true solution has had a lot of bugs and issues documented and some of them solved. It also mean the team must take a break from development to learn whatever the new thing is. Some will need more time than other, which may slow it down even further. A lot of systems are developed in domains where "go fast and break things", A/B testing etc. would not be at all advisable. The main selfish focus on "adopt whatever is hip this week" is to pad resumes with it, consultant can come in to help train people $$$. Consultants will fight for it to use the newest and greatest since it may increased development time $$$.
- tdeck 4y ago
  This is a false dichotomy though. Your comment makes it sound like the only options are to keep using the same tech stack for 30 years or to "race" to adopt the "newest fad". What about switching from a moribund 30 year old technology to a mature 5-10 year old technology every now and then, based on an assessment of the very real drawbacks of living in the past. Security is one of the biggest problems with outdated software that many people are only too happy to ignore.
  - wellokthen2 4y ago
    Protip: you're much better off writing something in straight C than in [latest fad language du jour]

Lapsa 4y ago

with all the banning, down-voting and cancel culture in general - it's just not worth it. why should I even care if the receiving part isn't listening, got different agenda (yet another celebrity cult buildup || greed)? heck... the youth doesn't even know how to swear anymore. n word this, r word that - as if Lord Voldemort's gonna pop in. internet has created an illusion that teachers have become obsolete, even at work I refuse to criticize co-workers as it's not my job to evaluate them.

eh2beifhe 4y ago
What is your point? Are you saying you can't advocate for different tech stacks without using the n word?
- Lapsa 4y ago
  already said it. point is - *it's not worth it*. placed a small bait and that's pretty much all you took away from the post. why even bother? it's much easier to live w/o giving a crap that random dude from the interwebz might assume I'm a racist. unless you are an established public figure with bunch of sheep dancing around - exactly this is always the response. snarkiness, down votes, timeouts, public shaming. then I tell them to go fuck themselves and they ban me from their useless community. never ending bitching on stackoverflow about what's a duplicate and what's not. ending with KEKW
  - pohl 4y ago
    I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the concept of persona non grata predates the internet.
    - Lapsa 4y ago
      internet used to be different
      - pohl 4y ago
        the only constant is change

jongjong 4y ago

I used to be part of the silent majority of software developers but that changed after I became disillusioned about the direction of the industry. Nowadays, I'm basically forced to use certain inefficient tools in order to get a job because a bunch of highly vocal junior devs who got their way. It's a bit like in politics; when times are good for the majority, most normal people aren't interested in politics; they have better things to do; this apathy makes it easier for freaks to get power and start messing with things... Until it gets so bad that regular people start noticing and begrudgingly getting involved in politics.

specialist 4y ago
FWIW, every generation feels this way. Older me is now super embarrassed by my prior enthusiasm for object oriented programming and misc methodologies. I have very vivid memories of grey beards dismissing my naivety and me thinking "they just didn't get it." [0] If there's any kind of karma, today's noobs will live long enough to be mocked by even younger noobs. Small solace, I know. [0] I always remember criticisms. I've got the voice of doubt in the back of my head always wondering what I'm missing, what if they're right, etc. It's a serious bummer.
- wainstead 4y ago
  > I've got the voice of doubt in the back of my head always wondering what I'm missing, what if they're right, etc. It's a serious bummer. There's probably a saying somewhere along the lines of "There are two kinds of programmers: those who admit they get Imposter's Syndrome, and those who are too afraid to admit it." We all have those doubts. I've been in this since... what, 1994 professionally I suppose, and I still have doubts. It's totally normal. IS is not limited to software development either.
donatj 4y ago
I am regularly up at night in a cold sweat worrying about how if I suddenly needed to find a new job I’d have to learn some sort of front end JavaScript framework.

mkl95 4y ago

> But let’s be straight, that’s like 1% of all of the developers out there — the rest of them are just lurking and coding with their language of choice and being content with it. Be it Fortran, COBOL, Perl, or PHP. Assuming all developers who are using something like COBOL or Perl are content with it is hilarious. It doesn't really get much worse than something like COBOL or Perl in terms of ergonomics and ease of use.

biztos 4y ago
As a once and, who knows, maybe future Perl dev I find it a weird choice of grouping, no disrespect to Fortran, but I also think there are probably quite a few mature Perl codebases tended by mature Perl programmers who have their ergonomics and ease of use very dialed-in. Whether you would enjoy it is a different question, but my impression from years of doing Perl is that the most committed hackers tuned their environments and organized their projects just so, and would laugh at anybody else’s idea of “ergonomics.”
dan-robertson 4y ago
Php had pretty good docs online. COBOL presumably has good docs (though I think it’s a bad example and not used much). Perl used to have a thriving online community so it seems pretty conceivable to me that people could like the language. And CPAN still exists and is full of reasonably practical packages for doing lots of reasonable things, as well as packages like marpa which don’t really have equivalents outside of Perl.
msla 4y ago
I like Perl for small codebases heavily focused on manipulating text. It has first-class support for regular expressions, which means you can make them more readable in addition to doing more things with them more conveniently, and it largely stays out of my way. COBOL, on the other hand, is a domain-specific language for a domain most people here have no experience with: Software involving fixed-format input and fixed-point numerical calculations. It would be amazing if some language integrated a clear way to describe modern, recursively-defined input formats with the same degree of language support COBOL has for its data definition language. Go is still too verbose, sadly. Fortran suffers from FORTRAN, by which I mean if you mention Fortran to people they think of 1960s-era mainframe software with no string support, column-oriented fixed formatting, and GOTO use by people who'd never even heard of Dijkstra. Modern Fortran is not like that; sadly, much like Lisp, they never changed the name, so old ideas linger. (This is also true of Cobol.)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

donatj 4y ago

> Sometimes I’ve seen Pull Requests from empty accounts with a brief explanation of what was implemented. They just submit bug fixes, no drama. Over half my coworkers including some very talented developers have no public repos. As someone with almost 200 that always blows my mind. How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest question on my part. I want to understand.

astura 4y ago
>How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest question on my part. I want to understand. Because most people (myself included, 16 yrs professional experience) don't want to do unpaid work outside of work hours. How do you not understand that?
innocentoldguy 4y ago
I don’t have any public repos because I’d much rather spend my personal time with my family doing non-work things. I think it just comes down to what you value in your personal time. For some people, it is coding. For others, it isn’t. Neither is good or bad.
dceddia 4y ago
It sounds like you're starting with the assumption that if someone writes software to fill a hole of theirs, that they would almost certainly make it public. I don't think that's true for everyone.
wnolens 4y ago
I'm literally paid not to.
pavlov 4y ago
Great salespeople aren’t expected to run lemonade stands after work. “You’re so good at sales, how come you don’t want to sell something in the evening? There must be something you’re itching to sell to your neighbors.” Software engineers seem unique among professionals that you’re expected to maintain a hobbyist body of work that’s also your professional calling card.

gettingitdone 4y ago

I am probably part of the silent majority, at least until this comment. Be aware that my comment is focused on business. What you do as a hobby or a side project is out of scope. The debate around languages often focus on syntax differences, as if they alone would make a huge difference. We need to consider the eco system as a whole. Many have probably read the "blub paradox". The context of that article is his experience from building a product in the late nineties, when the eco system was so much smaller than what we have today. In a world where you have to invent your own frameworks and libraries to get things done, the article makes sense. I don't doubt that you will benefit from a powerful language, when you need to make something truly novel. Today we are in a completely different solution where 90% of web startups should use one of the existing frameworks and libraries to build upon, rather than making your own. It's basic "plumbing" compared to what we used to do 20 years ago. For the remaining 10% where they need to (re)invent a database or framework, a powerful language may have advantages when your product is mostly code. Another tendency caused by the bubble effect of HN/Reddit, is that many move on to different languages and is left with their impression of a language as it was years ago when they last used it. One good example of this is Java. If you asked me 10 years ago, I would say that Java had stagnated. If you ask me today, I will tell you of all the improvements that have been made and many more planned. A lot of the arguments against Java is based on old articles and experiences that are no longer valid. I am also wondering if some of the dislike is also caused by many learning it in school in an environment that has little to do with real work, but that is a different rant. I'm not saying Java is the coolest language out there, but the massive amount of open source and battle tested frameworks like Quarkus and Spring is a differentiator. I would argue that the "Blub paradox" of yesterday should be replaced with a "Bubble paradox", where the real work is done by pragmatic developers who use an ok language with an excellent eco system. It is sometimes frustrating to read articles about startups who clearly should have chosen better. Everything is fine in the beginning, and they write blog posts about the success they had which is circulated within the bubble. After some time they need to scale up and implement functionality that is not supported well in their eco system. They then spend time on solving problems that seem novel to them, but is basically a solved problem in a more mature eco system. Instead of growing the product, they are forced to spend time on the "glue". To paraphrase Breaking Bad: Are we in the money business, or the programming business? If I have to bet on two startups, where one uses the latest bubble language and the other Java, I would bet on Java in 90% of the cases. I know that they will get things done. Perhaps even modern PHP would be preferable.

kkfx 4y ago

Well... Silent majority also means the mass of people who do not contribute to the society except for they use as meat-based weapons in politics, religion... Yes they have a value, for some it's the same value of a flock of cows: munging meat, milk etc. For some a hope or absence thereof for the humanity. IN history unfortunately the former tend to win all the time...

eh2beifhe 4y ago
So how does this apply to software then? Why are silent people in the software industry "meat based weapons" and what for?
- kkfx 4y ago
  "software" does not means only developers, PMs and code monkeys, but also "moderators" for GAFAM and their Chinese/Russian counterparts, who normally happen to be very stressed and little paid censors, i.e. meat-based weapons against their own co-Citizens. But also those who act a bit like code monkeys to develop common crapware so many use, mostly in web and business crapware etc. They all contribute to DESTROY IT and civilization together. I just only suggest a thought: did you noticed how many now can't use pen&papers properly for instance to write something a bit more long and complex than a quick few words note? Well, there is nothing wrong in that IF they know to do the same with some other mean... The issue is that they do not equally know how to do on a computer. Actually we have even lawyers unable to format a decent letter without a template on a computer or by pen&paper. I call them skilled illiterate... And that's not only about a letter, for diagrams, simple drawing it's the same. Most can't even IMAGING doing something like humans have done on paper 10+ years ago with a software, they can't imaging having in a unique documents some text, formulas, a plot, an email etc. They are so trained that you need a different program for anything (because that's good for business) that they feel the WOW effect just seeing a modern limited and limiting "notebook UI". Some colleagues (sysadmins and some devs) have a similar effects seeing me with Emacs, many at first demo act like children in front of something new that seem magic to their eyes. That's is.

Existenceblinks 4y ago

Indeed silence. During market research, looking for potential developers who would use our developer tools is difficult. Keep asking myself where are these guys? Tech twitter is literally javascript thingy echo chamber. Reddit is newbie marketplace with a lot of bias advice for beginners. HN is like ok boomer who don't buy anything. This is my perception.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

It's not just that they are silent, most of them don't even speak English that well; or at all. And they build a lot of software. And they are all over the world. Any tech stack that ever mattered, there are still countless of people using working with that on a daily basis. There are a lot of developers out there, tens of millions. That little bubble of users actually commenting on HN is tiny in comparison. So, yes it's good to be aware of that and appreciate the world is bigger than that. At the same time, like with politics, just because they are silent does not mean they don't have opinions. And they vote. With their feet. They'll adopt practices, tools, and technology they like or need and walk away from other things.

etothepii 4y ago

> First of all, when you're vocal, you're more likely to be heard. Why is being heard a good thing? When I was at school I was the insufferable kid who always put their hand up as I knew the answer. Thinking somehow that the teacher wanted to know the answer. What I learned as I grew up is a lesson learned is better than a lesson told.

Barrin92 4y ago

made me think of a thread here recently, can't remember which one exactly, that had the general tone of "who even develops on Windows?". People in the .Net ecosystem at least it seems like are very underrepresented here given how large of a platform that is.

raxxorraxor 4y ago
There are "arcane" development communities that are far less engaged in "social programming". The Basic Community is quite large as well and I think I have never met a developer on the net. .net is even larger but increasingly the community seems to withdraw as well. As someone who formerly developed on that platform I wonder where they exchange themselves nowadays. I know quite a few companies that develop on .net, mainly in C# instead of Basic of course. But I rarely see any discussions about it. Wouldn't know where to ask in-depth technical questions.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Stackoverflow (and its offshoots) is pretty .NET heavy, perhaps unsurprisingly given its heritage.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

Reminds me of a story that was linked from here, a few years ago[0]. Places like this, get caught up in “shiny,” and that doesn’t always reflect reality. For example, it is fashionable, hereabout, to throw shade on PHP. I present Exhibit A, the “Fishtank Graph”[1]. We were just discussing something similar, yesterday, in the SwiftUI thread[2]. [0] https://vickiboykis.com/2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/ https://vickiboykis.com/2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/ [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming_language/ms/y https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32631219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32631219

mikewarot 4y ago

There is a tendency towards proactive change here on HN, which is fine with this old retired programmer. I'm all for making new systems that utilize all that's been learned since the 1960s. What I'm NOT in favor of is the disrespect of legacy. There are millions of systems out there in the world in manufacturing environments. These systems are ancient, I worked in a shop making gears for 5 years. The CNC lathe we used had a GE computer running it from 1970, and it used mylar punched tape to store programs. It was a huge investment when it was purchased, and there was an old guy (about 70) who they called for repairs on it and much of the other ancient hardware. This shop had 6 employees, including me. At it's peak, there were 50 or so, during and after the Viet Nam war. That hardware was sooooo old, but it still worked, reliably turning out the same few types of shafts and other parts we need to turn into gears and splines and other gear shaped objects (like turbine blades). The programmer in me desperately wanted to keep the lathe, the motor, and just replace the control system with GRBL, but even if that was free, and worked the first time, the risk that an upgrade represented was completely unacceptable. When you're in a job shop, there are parts you've been making for a generation in small quantities (less than 500). Those parts are relied upon by other businesses as part of their product. If you "upgrade" any part of your process, you risk producing a part which doesn't work somewhere down the supply chain. If you make that happen too many times, you'll lose your customers. It's also important to know that gear cutting was only a step in the production chain... we didn't start from raw materials most of the time, we were given a "blank" on which to cut teeth, that already had many operations performed on it. It was almost never just a matter of sawing off a new piece of metal and starting over. You had to respect the work already put into a gear blank, or shaft to cut splines on. The incentives in manufacturing are strongly against any type of change. However, they aren't blindly obeyed. If there are new jobs, then it's reasonable to try out the new machines or new systems in those cases. If something can cut the cost of a part by half, then it might be worth the risk, if the customer approves a change. Please don't think that those in the silent majority of the world are un-reflective of the needs for security and other patches... but if things break every Wednesday, they'll disable Windows Updates forever, for very good reason.

Karen48 4y ago

[dead]

heisenbit 4y ago

Being vocal or silent - does this matter as long as one does not listen first?

3pt14159 4y ago

Some things I'm silent about, other things I'm not. Articles like this often fail to differentiate that there usually isn't one large blob of people that are chatty about all the things all the time. Usually individuals have their own specific issues that they're interested in and passionate about and will default to the consensus or be fine with any option for the rest of it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

keithalewis 4y ago

"There are so many articles and comments by people whose level of enthusiasm doesn't match their experience." Bingo!

avgcorrection 4y ago

It’s surprising to me that the Silent Majority is still brought up with such a connection to Nixon considering - WaterGate - The reputation of the Vietnam War - The good things that came out of the counterculture like the Civil Rights Movement

ksec 4y ago

>While browsing HackerNews, I sometimes get the feeling that every developer out there is working for FAANG Bubbles on HN; Entry level Web Developers are getting $200K per year working in FAANG or Big Tech. Non-FANNG are getting $150K anyway. Ruby may be dead, but PHP is even more dead. Java may rule the enterprise, but you should not mention Java. No one uses Oracle or MySQL, why would you want that? Postgres is the only DB forward. Everything should be Remote. Communication should always be Async. Oh, Ada is the second Forbidden Fruit on HN. Facebook is...... OK I guess we shouldn't go there. USB-C will solve all cabling problems. Everything should be USB-C. 5G is useless. AV1 and AVIF. The video and image standard to rule them all. Nothing should be centralised. Everything should be distributed. Finally, The unwritten rule of HN. You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet.

stopyellingatme 4y ago
Nailed it.
temphnaccount 4y ago
These are still non controversial. Controversial bubbles on HN are: * Everything should be free and open source. Just because small portion of the HN can donate to their favorite projects, everyone should run on donations. Ads are forbidden on the internet. No internet business should be a profitable company. * Tiring and useless interview process designed by FAANG etc is no way a farce and a totally justified practice (some version of Stockholm syndrome there) * Private companies should not interfere in the politics/internal matter of another country. (This view quickly changes when they see the negative effect of same companies in their own country) * YC is the best and the most exclusive startup accelerator/incubator in the world. If you got accepted in YC, you have won in life.
- CSMastermind 4y ago
  > * Tiring and useless interview process designed by FAANG etc is no way a farce and a totally justified practice (some version of Stockholm syndrome there) I'd say it's the opposite. The view you're expressing: that the standard software interview process is somehow "useless" strikes me as a bubble here. I'd wager most people not on hackernews don't hold your view.

roeles 4y ago

I wonder... in a world where everybody talks... Who is listening? It's not as if the world lacks ideas or opinions. If anything, we lack wisdom.