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Finally, a reasonable programming blog post. I'm so tired of the inane myths coming out of the programming community like the recent 'liberal/conservative' thi

Finally, a reasonable programming blog post. I'm so tired of the inane myths coming out of the programming community like the recent 'liberal/conservative' thing and the 501 manifesto. It seems like every 2 months I have to stop visiting hacker news and proggit while another one of these seemingly intuitive but unsupported link-bait blog posts comes around followed by a deluge of links saying NUH-UH. Here's the thing, if there is no research supporting your intuition, it's just bullshit. Bullshit is all fine and good until it gets repeated as fact, after that it hurts our professional integrity and enforces biases and discrimination. Fucking stop it.

jacquesm 14y ago
Lots of research gets started because of intuition. If there is no research supporting your intuition it may simply be that nobody got around to doing any, not that your intuition is 100% certain bullshit. So when you find your intuition is not supported by research go do some research. Don't automatically assume it is bullshit or otherwise lots of research will never get done. And then share the outcome of that research (positive and negative) along with your intuition.
cben 14y ago
I disagree - distilled intuition is priceless. Intuition is why I learnt most of what I know about hacking came not from university courses () but from scouring the internet for interesting reading, studying open source and RFCs, and reading blogs. Intuition is why I come to HN and and stackoverflow (or formerly to the c2 wiki and usenet) instead of reading ACM journals. The programming landscape is vast, and there are a 1000 ways to do the same thing, but a few of them are beautiful, and I want to know why, and what guided their design, and how should I think about these things. Research is mostly silent on this, and when there is research it's hard to tell how credible it is. Whereas if Bram Cohen writes something about networking, I listen up, because having created bittorrent is a way stronger signal of credibility than having an X citation index. And yes, I'm deeply biased. E.g. I read Stevey's Rants because I share a lot of his beliefs, and love his writing style. So I get confirmation of my beliefs, and they may still be wrong, but at least now I have a good vocabulary* to discuss my beliefs, e.g. "liberal"/"conservative". I loved the Unix style before reading TAOUP, but now I have clearer definitions - and names - for the qualities I admired. BTW, the Jargon File is an early example of hackers seeking out a shared vocabulary of intuition. (*) SICP was an outlier (as were some other courses my university borrowed from MIT). Written by exceptional hackers, talking about design principles explicitly, and exemplifying elegance on every corner (it wouldn't be half as great if it used CL instead of Scheme!). "Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." - SICP didn't cite research to support this intuition, but I'm ready to repeat this one as fact. What was bullshit was an OOP course taught by a CS professor who doesn't code much and TA'd by a Java drone.

jacquesm 14y ago

Lots of research gets started because of intuition. If there is no research supporting your intuition it may simply be that nobody got around to doing any, not that your intuition is 100% certain bullshit. So when you find your intuition is not supported by research go do some research. Don't automatically assume it is bullshit or otherwise lots of research will never get done. And then share the outcome of that research (positive and negative) along with your intuition.

cben 14y ago

I disagree - distilled intuition is priceless. Intuition is why I learnt most of what I know about hacking came not from university courses () but from scouring the internet for interesting reading, studying open source and RFCs, and reading blogs. Intuition is why I come to HN and and stackoverflow (or formerly to the c2 wiki and usenet) instead of reading ACM journals. The programming landscape is vast, and there are a 1000 ways to do the same thing, but a few of them are beautiful, and I want to know why, and what guided their design, and how should I think about these things. Research is mostly silent on this, and when there is research it's hard to tell how credible it is. Whereas if Bram Cohen writes something about networking, I listen up, because having created bittorrent is a way stronger signal of credibility than having an X citation index. And yes, I'm deeply biased. E.g. I read Stevey's Rants because I share a lot of his beliefs, and love his writing style. So I get confirmation of my beliefs, and they may still be wrong, but at least now I have a good vocabulary* to discuss my beliefs, e.g. "liberal"/"conservative". I loved the Unix style before reading TAOUP, but now I have clearer definitions - and names - for the qualities I admired. BTW, the Jargon File is an early example of hackers seeking out a shared vocabulary of intuition. (*) SICP was an outlier (as were some other courses my university borrowed from MIT). Written by exceptional hackers, talking about design principles explicitly, and exemplifying elegance on every corner (it wouldn't be half as great if it used CL instead of Scheme!). "Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." - SICP didn't cite research to support this intuition, but I'm ready to repeat this one as fact. What was bullshit was an OOP course taught by a CS professor who doesn't code much and TA'd by a Java drone.