4 ms·

> In the 1970s, programming was an elite's task. Today programming is done by uneducated "farmers" and as a result, the care for smart algorithms, memory usage,

by zmxz 4y ago

> In the 1970s, programming was an elite's task. Today programming is done by uneducated "farmers" and as a result, the care for smart algorithms, memory usage, CPU-time usage and the like has dwindled in comparison. What's wrong with that statement? In 1970's, the number of people who dealt with programming was significantly smaller than today. It's a matter of fact. And people who worked with computers back then were highly educated and pioneers of the technology, there was no room for half-hearted effort or "let's copy the first result from stackoverflow.com". Today, programmers who are meticulous, detail-oriented and who genuinely recognize the problem first are in minority and that's how I read the above. The author might have stated it abruptly, but it does not mean he's wrong. You're using the "cool little library", yet you have this kind of resentment for the person who made it, have you even tried to look at the situation from their perspective before you passed the judgement? I'm asking out of curiosity, because I can relate to having to work with under-skilled individuals who spend more time sorting out their CV and online presence than their work.

323 4y ago
You can be both right and an asshole. These things are not exclusive. There is a way to say what he is saying without calling all of today's programmers "farmers", which also has some undertones that being a farmer is somehow shameful. > under-skilled individuals who spend more time sorting out their CV and online presence than their work That sounds more like a organizational/hiring problem.
- zmxz 4y ago
  In gaming culture, a farmer is someone who repeats the same actions for extended periods of time. It's not an insult in gaming context, and "farming" in the context of our craft does not relate to actual farmers. It sounds like taking things out of context to gain moral upper hand which allows for insulting the author. I have to be devil's advocate, this whole shaming because someone else might have gotten offended is seriously tiresome. Library is crafted well, guy's annoyed with self-proclaimed crappy devs, yet the freedom to say so is revoked by the very community he helps.
  - 323 4y ago
    Calling someone a "farmer" or a "peasant" is a well known insult. The gaming use of the word is much less known. > 1. a person who farms; person who operates a farm or cultivates land. > 2. Slang: Disparaging and Offensive. an unsophisticated or ignorant person, especially one from a rural area. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/farmer https://www.dictionary.com/browse/farmer
    - naasking 4y ago
      Sure, it's well known to English-speaking natives. This library was written by a Swedish consulting firm.
      - Kiro 4y ago
        "Farmer" is even more degrading in Swedish ("bonde"), to the point where you avoid using it even for actual farmers and say "agriculturalist" ("jordbrukare") instead.
    - zmxz 4y ago
      But it's not an insult towards actual farmers, it's an insult towards an impostor that pretends they're doing valuable work while all they do is the opposite and they merely throw time at a problem, creating illusion of value. I'm saying this because I'm raised on a farm, I was always proud of it, I still do it as a hobby (and I love my crops) and I never, ever considered it an insult when I heard a term "farmer" or "peasant". Nowadays, I read about people being offended in my stead, giving themselves the right to insult other people, like author of microwebsockets. Is there a world in which haters could hate without using excuses such as "it insults farmers"? I'm one of the farmers, I am not insulted, I do have the right to say this and point the attention at the *real* problem - and it's fake developers.
      - iam-TJ 4y ago
        I join you in these sentiments - born-n-bred on the farm, still there, and hacking software since 1981! My most regular outburst of swearing is about 'dev-ops' and lack of engineering discipline and occurs almost daily :)
Beltalowda 4y ago
He follows through with an entire rant about people using "2022-10-26 14:59:42" to represent dates instead of 1666789167 Unix timestamps, and JSON in general. If that's really your best example then meh... I use JSON and string time formats because it's just easier to inspect things with curl or whatnot and gives a nice balance between human-readable and machine-readable, which I rather like for APIs. I do the same with database stuff, so "select * from foo" can be easily read. It can be quite helpful in debugging and the performance difference (even with compression) is just negligible in most cases. But what do I know ... I'm just a farmer. Now excuse me while I go shove my computer down a shredder and go do something else.
- edf13 4y ago
  Right tool for the right job… JSON and long format dates work in 90%+ of cases where bleeding edge optimisation is not required.
epicide 4y ago
> In 1970's, the number of people who dealt with programming was significantly smaller than today. It's a matter of fact. And people who worked with computers back then were highly educated and pioneers of the technology, there was no room for half-hearted effort or "let's copy the first result from stackoverflow.com". And yet probably the same percentage of what they wrote was utter crap [0]. The illusion comes from having more people writing more code for more reasons now. Sturgeon's law still applies. On top of that, the industry rewards those who: * "Produce results" insetad of those who pre-empted a bug 5 years in advance by building something to be robust [1]. * Job hop every year or two, and thereby disproportionately rewarding those who work on their CV. * Are personal friends and family of higher ups [2]. To claim the major reason why software is in its current state is largely/solely because of all the "farmers" is harmful ignorance, at best. > programmers who are meticulous, detail-oriented and who genuinely recognize the problem first are in minority Perhaps the biggest problems in(/with) technology today aren't of a technical nature. If even somewhat true, then those who are "meticulously and genuinely recognizing the problems" aren't necessarily even programmers. [0]: This is hard/impossible to know one way or the other due to survivorship bias. A lot of software from the 70s is just gone. [1]: Instances of this are hard to even find, naturally. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. [2]: Hardly exclusive to IT, but still a significant factor.
- aniforprez 4y ago
  As someone who once was part of an outsourced team maintaining a COBOL system, I can attest to the fact that people wrote shit then, and will continue to write shit. I was trying to debug and figure what the hell was going on in some especially complex logic and found the author's comment at the top of the file with the date "1983". I put my resignation papers 2 weeks later and moved on to JS, Python and systems design
bmitc 4y ago
That wasn't my understanding of the past. I had the perspective that early programmers were basically cowboys in the wild west, people from a variety of backgrounds that were just in the right place and took on the projects.
alexhultman 4y ago
This. 1970s programming was like 2020s quantum computing. It was an elite's task. That's my message here.

by zmxz 4y ago

323 4y ago

You can be both right and an asshole. These things are not exclusive. There is a way to say what he is saying without calling all of today's programmers "farmers", which also has some undertones that being a farmer is somehow shameful. > under-skilled individuals who spend more time sorting out their CV and online presence than their work That sounds more like a organizational/hiring problem.

zmxz 4y ago
In gaming culture, a farmer is someone who repeats the same actions for extended periods of time. It's not an insult in gaming context, and "farming" in the context of our craft does not relate to actual farmers. It sounds like taking things out of context to gain moral upper hand which allows for insulting the author. I have to be devil's advocate, this whole shaming because someone else might have gotten offended is seriously tiresome. Library is crafted well, guy's annoyed with self-proclaimed crappy devs, yet the freedom to say so is revoked by the very community he helps.
- 323 4y ago
  Calling someone a "farmer" or a "peasant" is a well known insult. The gaming use of the word is much less known. > 1. a person who farms; person who operates a farm or cultivates land. > 2. Slang: Disparaging and Offensive. an unsophisticated or ignorant person, especially one from a rural area. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/farmer https://www.dictionary.com/browse/farmer
  - naasking 4y ago
    Sure, it's well known to English-speaking natives. This library was written by a Swedish consulting firm.
    - Kiro 4y ago
      "Farmer" is even more degrading in Swedish ("bonde"), to the point where you avoid using it even for actual farmers and say "agriculturalist" ("jordbrukare") instead.
  - zmxz 4y ago
    But it's not an insult towards actual farmers, it's an insult towards an impostor that pretends they're doing valuable work while all they do is the opposite and they merely throw time at a problem, creating illusion of value. I'm saying this because I'm raised on a farm, I was always proud of it, I still do it as a hobby (and I love my crops) and I never, ever considered it an insult when I heard a term "farmer" or "peasant". Nowadays, I read about people being offended in my stead, giving themselves the right to insult other people, like author of microwebsockets. Is there a world in which haters could hate without using excuses such as "it insults farmers"? I'm one of the farmers, I am not insulted, I do have the right to say this and point the attention at the *real* problem - and it's fake developers.
    - iam-TJ 4y ago
      I join you in these sentiments - born-n-bred on the farm, still there, and hacking software since 1981! My most regular outburst of swearing is about 'dev-ops' and lack of engineering discipline and occurs almost daily :)

Beltalowda 4y ago

He follows through with an entire rant about people using "2022-10-26 14:59:42" to represent dates instead of 1666789167 Unix timestamps, and JSON in general. If that's really your best example then meh... I use JSON and string time formats because it's just easier to inspect things with curl or whatnot and gives a nice balance between human-readable and machine-readable, which I rather like for APIs. I do the same with database stuff, so "select * from foo" can be easily read. It can be quite helpful in debugging and the performance difference (even with compression) is just negligible in most cases. But what do I know ... I'm just a farmer. Now excuse me while I go shove my computer down a shredder and go do something else.

edf13 4y ago
Right tool for the right job… JSON and long format dates work in 90%+ of cases where bleeding edge optimisation is not required.

epicide 4y ago

> In 1970's, the number of people who dealt with programming was significantly smaller than today. It's a matter of fact. And people who worked with computers back then were highly educated and pioneers of the technology, there was no room for half-hearted effort or "let's copy the first result from stackoverflow.com". And yet probably the same percentage of what they wrote was utter crap [0]. The illusion comes from having more people writing more code for more reasons now. Sturgeon's law still applies. On top of that, the industry rewards those who: * "Produce results" insetad of those who pre-empted a bug 5 years in advance by building something to be robust [1]. * Job hop every year or two, and thereby disproportionately rewarding those who work on their CV. * Are personal friends and family of higher ups [2]. To claim the major reason why software is in its current state is largely/solely because of all the "farmers" is harmful ignorance, at best. > programmers who are meticulous, detail-oriented and who genuinely recognize the problem first are in minority Perhaps the biggest problems in(/with) technology today aren't of a technical nature. If even somewhat true, then those who are "meticulously and genuinely recognizing the problems" aren't necessarily even programmers. [0]: This is hard/impossible to know one way or the other due to survivorship bias. A lot of software from the 70s is just gone. [1]: Instances of this are hard to even find, naturally. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. [2]: Hardly exclusive to IT, but still a significant factor.

aniforprez 4y ago
As someone who once was part of an outsourced team maintaining a COBOL system, I can attest to the fact that people wrote shit then, and will continue to write shit. I was trying to debug and figure what the hell was going on in some especially complex logic and found the author's comment at the top of the file with the date "1983". I put my resignation papers 2 weeks later and moved on to JS, Python and systems design

bmitc 4y ago

That wasn't my understanding of the past. I had the perspective that early programmers were basically cowboys in the wild west, people from a variety of backgrounds that were just in the right place and took on the projects.

alexhultman 4y ago

This. 1970s programming was like 2020s quantum computing. It was an elite's task. That's my message here.