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Software developers are highly trained and conditioned but poorly educated. They live in the trees leaving the forest to the "experts". As a result, they tend

Software developers are highly trained and conditioned but poorly educated. They live in the trees leaving the forest to the "experts". As a result, they tend to "believe" as much as they reason and will accept "hype" and "opinion" as readily as proven science. And they do so repeatedly --- OOP, AI, OSS, XML and cryptocurrency are all examples of this. They don't care where the next train is going, just give them a pseudo-plausible excuse and they will jump onboard.

seanhunter 2y ago
I think you are generalising wildly here. My prior is that human beings are prone to hype and opinion in general. You'd need to provide some evidence that software developers are different from that in some important way for that to be significant. Then to the substance of your points, firstly, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with jumping aboard new tech to see what it's like. As engineers our curiousity should be enough to make us want to do that. The fact that people are prepared to pay money for us to do so is a nice added bonus. Secondly I have worked with software engineers of all kinds during my career and if you throw 10 different engineers in a room and ask their views on some technology you'll have some n>>1 and probably n>=10 opinions about it. There isn't some engineering hivemind that all thinks the same thing. People who are into a certain thing are vocal about it. If you asked engineers whethere they are into oop, functional programming, rust, react, whatever they are likely to be no less vocal about it than engineers who are into EDM, HipHop, Jazz, Metal or Taylor Swift. People like different things, engineers are people therefore engineers like different things. Finally, we are in a new discipline so there isn't very much proven science and the way we get there is by experimentation. That means trying tech out and learning lessons from how things go wrong. Until that stage of maturity much of everything is opinion.
orwin 2y ago
Clearly you don't know a lot of software developers. Or maybe you're right and I'm just lucky each time with my coworkers. Also, adding OSS (and to a lesser degree, XML) to a list of 'hype' product is quite the reach. The first because Open Source is 50 years old and gained ground slowly, and the second because I don't think XML was ever trendy amongst developers. Maybe Ops, sec or management liked it, but devs? I recognize it's qualities but I'd rather hang myself with poorly formatted CSV (even with libraries to generate it: XML is a fucking pain to debug).

seanhunter 2y ago

I think you are generalising wildly here. My prior is that human beings are prone to hype and opinion in general. You'd need to provide some evidence that software developers are different from that in some important way for that to be significant. Then to the substance of your points, firstly, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with jumping aboard new tech to see what it's like. As engineers our curiousity should be enough to make us want to do that. The fact that people are prepared to pay money for us to do so is a nice added bonus. Secondly I have worked with software engineers of all kinds during my career and if you throw 10 different engineers in a room and ask their views on some technology you'll have some n>>1 and probably n>=10 opinions about it. There isn't some engineering hivemind that all thinks the same thing. People who are into a certain thing are vocal about it. If you asked engineers whethere they are into oop, functional programming, rust, react, whatever they are likely to be no less vocal about it than engineers who are into EDM, HipHop, Jazz, Metal or Taylor Swift. People like different things, engineers are people therefore engineers like different things. Finally, we are in a new discipline so there isn't very much proven science and the way we get there is by experimentation. That means trying tech out and learning lessons from how things go wrong. Until that stage of maturity much of everything is opinion.

orwin 2y ago

Clearly you don't know a lot of software developers. Or maybe you're right and I'm just lucky each time with my coworkers. Also, adding OSS (and to a lesser degree, XML) to a list of 'hype' product is quite the reach. The first because Open Source is 50 years old and gained ground slowly, and the second because I don't think XML was ever trendy amongst developers. Maybe Ops, sec or management liked it, but devs? I recognize it's qualities but I'd rather hang myself with poorly formatted CSV (even with libraries to generate it: XML is a fucking pain to debug).