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I know it's a joke article, but I still find it pointless and without substance. What can anyone learn from it?

by Hexstream 18y ago

bmj 18y ago
Must everything be a lesson?
- Hexstream 18y ago
  Everything that gets upvoted to the top HN position should have... something interesting about it in some way. Apart from a linkbait title.
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  Not necessarily, but favoring intellectually rewarding stuff is a good way to keep the front page from getting saturated with e.g. lolcats.
  - bmj 18y ago
    I think, as pointed out in another comment, that this post isn't just lolcat-esque--it does paint a picture of programming in the 1980s, something many of us haven't experienced.
    - silentbicycle 18y ago
      I agree - I've heard of people considering Lisp (with its garbage collection) incredibly indulgent and inefficient decades ago, but that's sufficiently before my time that it was an interesting read. I just think that, in general, "voted up because it's funny, even though it's also dumb" is a terrible precedent.
willchang 18y ago
I thought this post was information-dense to the point of being poetic. (1) I wasn't around in the early 80's so I appreciate insight into what hacking was like back then. (2) It's interesting how something as great as hacking really could be made ridiculous by those Principles that he cited, and that self-important educators did those kind of things, and I wonder if that happens a lot today. (3) It's also true that hackers like getting close to the metal and having control over their machine, to the point of making disk actuators spin or indicator lights blink, etc. Surely it is right to lament the seldomness with which such things concern us today? (4) I thought it was funny that ugly, all-caps names like MEMQ and ASSQ, were NOT the things that he complained about, since as an assembly programmer he wouldn't even notice. Nomenclatural conventions is a microcosm of hacking. The things people say about how names should be -- short, long, structured, typographically this way or that -- these are analogous to what people say hacking should be. It is telling that early lispers didn't give a shit about names that looked like opcodes. (5) As profound as Lisp was, it probably did suffer from being taught by the same guys that came up with those Principles. Like Chaucer urged before, let us separate the wheat from the chaff.

I know it's a joke article, but I still find it pointless and without substance. What can anyone learn from it?

bmj 18y ago

Must everything be a lesson?

Hexstream 18y ago
Everything that gets upvoted to the top HN position should have... something interesting about it in some way. Apart from a linkbait title.
silentbicycle 18y ago
Not necessarily, but favoring intellectually rewarding stuff is a good way to keep the front page from getting saturated with e.g. lolcats.
- bmj 18y ago
  I think, as pointed out in another comment, that this post isn't just lolcat-esque--it does paint a picture of programming in the 1980s, something many of us haven't experienced.
  - silentbicycle 18y ago
    I agree - I've heard of people considering Lisp (with its garbage collection) incredibly indulgent and inefficient decades ago, but that's sufficiently before my time that it was an interesting read. I just think that, in general, "voted up because it's funny, even though it's also dumb" is a terrible precedent.

willchang 18y ago

I thought this post was information-dense to the point of being poetic. (1) I wasn't around in the early 80's so I appreciate insight into what hacking was like back then. (2) It's interesting how something as great as hacking really could be made ridiculous by those Principles that he cited, and that self-important educators did those kind of things, and I wonder if that happens a lot today. (3) It's also true that hackers like getting close to the metal and having control over their machine, to the point of making disk actuators spin or indicator lights blink, etc. Surely it is right to lament the seldomness with which such things concern us today? (4) I thought it was funny that ugly, all-caps names like MEMQ and ASSQ, were NOT the things that he complained about, since as an assembly programmer he wouldn't even notice. Nomenclatural conventions is a microcosm of hacking. The things people say about how names should be -- short, long, structured, typographically this way or that -- these are analogous to what people say hacking should be. It is telling that early lispers didn't give a shit about names that looked like opcodes. (5) As profound as Lisp was, it probably did suffer from being taught by the same guys that came up with those Principles. Like Chaucer urged before, let us separate the wheat from the chaff.