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Dark Side has such powerful allure, such temptation; they are strong emotions that leave such indelible marks. And I feel like code culture is one place in nee

Dark Side has such powerful allure, such temptation; they are strong emotions that leave such indelible marks. And I feel like code culture is one place in need of some checks, on it's checking. There's so many wide-ranging beers out there, prejudices. Some have fought those battles & have real experience, speak from the heart. But I feel like over time the tribalisms that form, of passed down old biases, are usually more successful & better magnets when they are anti- a thing than pro a thing. JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, rust. Systemd, PipeWire, Wayland. Kubernetes. OOP, CORBA, SOAP. These are examples topics are all magnets for very strong disdain, that in various circles are accepted as bad. It's usually pretty easy to identify the darksiders. Theres almost never any principle of charity; they rarely see in greys, rarely even substantiate or enumerate their complaints at all. I've been struggling to find words, good words, for the disdain which doesn't justify itself, which accepts it's own premise, but the callous disregard & trampling over a topic is something I would like very much to be a faux pas. Say what you mean, clearly, with arguments. Manage your emotional reactions. Don't try to stir up antagonism. If you can, cultivate within yourself a sense of possibility & appreciation, even if only for what might be. Principles of Charity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity I'm forgetting what else to link, but around the aughts this anti- anti-social behavior has a bit of a boom. Two examples, https://marco.org/2008/05/21/jeff-atwood-who-knows-nothing-about-php-insults-php https://marco.org/2008/05/21/jeff-atwood-who-knows-nothing-a... https://steveklabnik.com/writing/matz-is-nice-so-we-are-nice/ https://steveklabnik.com/writing/matz-is-nice-so-we-are-nice... (And those on the pro side need to also have charity too.) The idea of the Speaker For The Dead, someone who tries to paint clearly both upsides and downsides of a thing, is one I respect a lot & want to see. A thing I wish we saw more of. (I feel like I have a decent ability to see up and down sides to a lot of the techs I listed. One I'd like better illumination on, a speaker for the dead on: CORBA.)

throwitaway1123 2y ago
I agree with the general sentiment of your comment and I think there are several factors at play here. * The human brain is not capable of evaluating and re-evaluating every possible option amongst the plethora of technical choices developers are faced with. This forces us to develop certain coarse grained mental heuristics (prejudices and biases) to navigate technology, and even if these broad generalizations are roughly true initially, we tend not to re-evaluate them over time. This leads to stale biases (e.g. some library/language was missing an API 10 years ago, and someone formed an immutable opinion on it). * These broad generalizations lack nuance. I watched a talk recently by Dan Abramov where he calls these heuristics (I'm paraphrasing) a form of information compression [1]. That compression is lossy — it doesn't preserve the original context in which the heuristic was formed. * There's also some insecurity at play here too. Developers want to believe that they've chosen The One True Solution, and harshly invalidating the alternatives is one way to reenforce that fantasy. * And of course, social media has exacerbated this problem by rewarding inflammatory hot takes. You won't get nearly as many views/upvotes/likes for a sober take that says "technology X is well suited for this narrow use case" as you will for a hot take that says "why technology X failed", or "why everyone hates technology X". You might enjoy this link: https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17KCHwOwgms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17KCHwOwgms
- throwawayie6 2y ago
  I think a general lack of criticism also plays a part. When someone has decided that X is the best approach, they tend to point to blog articles that favour their point of view as "proof", while dismissing other point of views as "uninformed". A typical example are all those "We rewrote our service from X to Y and got huge benefits" articles. - They are ignoring the fact that the new version has the benefit of years of experience with the actual problem domain and can be optimized - They also tend to use a different stack such as a more specialized database, async processing using message queues etc. that provides huge benefits. Someone will always cherry pick some aspect of that article (language or choice of database) as proof that their point of view is correct, while ignoring the fact that they are not comparing an apple with an apple. To get a real comparison they should have written a third system using their new architecture and the old langauge, but that would of course be hard to justify outside of academic research. The developers probably wouldn't do it anyway, because if the old language proved just as effective it would be harder to justify why they chose a new language. Resumé Driven Development is unfortunately a real thing.
  - throwitaway1123 2y ago
    > To get a real comparison they should have written a third system using their new architecture and the old langauge, but that would of course be hard to justify outside of academic research. Good point. You need a control group to make sure you're measuring the thing you think you're measuring.
lyu07282 2y ago
I was such a darksider once, definitely not any more, I don't think there was anything other than gaining broad experience that changed me. I can see how specialization and too narrow focused experience would've resulted in me never changing. In conclusion, the wisdom is just to understand that opinions (including your own) are worthless, there is no real way to tell the objective difference between a good one and a bad one. You can know the good and the bad, specifically about something, and that's very useful, but even that list is always going to be incomplete and possibly cherry picked.

throwitaway1123 2y ago

I agree with the general sentiment of your comment and I think there are several factors at play here. * The human brain is not capable of evaluating and re-evaluating every possible option amongst the plethora of technical choices developers are faced with. This forces us to develop certain coarse grained mental heuristics (prejudices and biases) to navigate technology, and even if these broad generalizations are roughly true initially, we tend not to re-evaluate them over time. This leads to stale biases (e.g. some library/language was missing an API 10 years ago, and someone formed an immutable opinion on it). * These broad generalizations lack nuance. I watched a talk recently by Dan Abramov where he calls these heuristics (I'm paraphrasing) a form of information compression [1]. That compression is lossy — it doesn't preserve the original context in which the heuristic was formed. * There's also some insecurity at play here too. Developers want to believe that they've chosen The One True Solution, and harshly invalidating the alternatives is one way to reenforce that fantasy. * And of course, social media has exacerbated this problem by rewarding inflammatory hot takes. You won't get nearly as many views/upvotes/likes for a sober take that says "technology X is well suited for this narrow use case" as you will for a hot take that says "why technology X failed", or "why everyone hates technology X". You might enjoy this link: https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17KCHwOwgms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17KCHwOwgms

throwawayie6 2y ago
I think a general lack of criticism also plays a part. When someone has decided that X is the best approach, they tend to point to blog articles that favour their point of view as "proof", while dismissing other point of views as "uninformed". A typical example are all those "We rewrote our service from X to Y and got huge benefits" articles. - They are ignoring the fact that the new version has the benefit of years of experience with the actual problem domain and can be optimized - They also tend to use a different stack such as a more specialized database, async processing using message queues etc. that provides huge benefits. Someone will always cherry pick some aspect of that article (language or choice of database) as proof that their point of view is correct, while ignoring the fact that they are not comparing an apple with an apple. To get a real comparison they should have written a third system using their new architecture and the old langauge, but that would of course be hard to justify outside of academic research. The developers probably wouldn't do it anyway, because if the old language proved just as effective it would be harder to justify why they chose a new language. Resumé Driven Development is unfortunately a real thing.
- throwitaway1123 2y ago
  > To get a real comparison they should have written a third system using their new architecture and the old langauge, but that would of course be hard to justify outside of academic research. Good point. You need a control group to make sure you're measuring the thing you think you're measuring.

lyu07282 2y ago

I was such a darksider once, definitely not any more, I don't think there was anything other than gaining broad experience that changed me. I can see how specialization and too narrow focused experience would've resulted in me never changing. In conclusion, the wisdom is just to understand that opinions (including your own) are worthless, there is no real way to tell the objective difference between a good one and a bad one. You can know the good and the bad, specifically about something, and that's very useful, but even that list is always going to be incomplete and possibly cherry picked.