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I really dislike the anti-intellectualism in fallacious quips like that. People discussing haskell and clojure are not magically prevented from writing code as

I really dislike the anti-intellectualism in fallacious quips like that. People discussing haskell and clojure are not magically prevented from writing code as a result of their intellectual curiosity and desire to explore better tools and methods. The implication that people who are smart and use quality tools never accomplish anything or do any work is quite insidious, as newcomers start taking pride in ignorance because they are "shipping product" while falsely believing those other people aren't. It becomes used as a way to dismiss opportunities to learn because they've equated learning and being educated with not accomplishing anything.

sbilstein 14y ago
agreed. Just because someone can use a pocket knife and some twine to lash together a chair in 20 minutes doesn't mean someone is going to buy that chair. Craftsmen care about their tools, and great craftsmen ship. Shitty ones can ship too, but it won't be good.
jskulski 14y ago
That's reading into it quite a bit.
- papsosouid 14y ago
  Honestly, I wish I could believe that. But I really don't see how I am reading anything into it. The implication that people who talk about programming languages that he doesn't want to learn about are not "shipping product" is quite clear. I don't see any way to interpret that sentiment other than as anti-intellectualism.
Domenic_S 14y ago
I guess strictly speaking it's a false dilemma to say you're either arguing endlessly or shipping, but I don't really think that was the spirit of the quote. Unless there are infinite productive hours in your day you have to choose your stack and go for it, and the less boilerplate you have to do to get your stack running, the more time you'll have for productivity. It's nuanced. We all of us owe our careers to the people who came before us asking, 'what if we could do it this way?'. But, you have to draw the line between intellectual wanking and thoughtlessness. It's a surprisingly hard line to draw - more for some than for others.
- papsosouid 14y ago
  >Unless there are infinite productive hours in your day you have to choose your stack and go for it But the people advocating haskell and clojure have done that. And they feel that their choice worked out so well that they should be nice enough to tell others how good it is. The people "just shipping with PHP" aren't spending their entire day coding, how is spending a half hour advocating for a programming language any different than spending that half hour watching TV (or as a more apt analogy, spending it arguing that PHP is totally good enough because I am shipping software in it so there's no need to ever try anything else)? >and the less boilerplate you have to do to get your stack running, the more time you'll have for productivity. This seems like an implication that using haskell or clojure somehow means having to deal with lots of boilerplate. That is not the case, and it is a rather odd thing to believe. This argument actually works against "just shipping in PHP". The less time you have to spend dealing with bugs that would have been prevented in another language, the more time you'll have for productivity. >But, you have to draw the line between intellectual wanking and thoughtlessness I believe the idea that there is anyone engaged in "intellectual wanking" instead of "shipping product" is fallacious. I've advocated haskell here before. Obviously I wasn't writing code while doing so, but would I have been writing code were I not advocating haskell? No, I would have been talking about something else, still not coding. Using downtime to advocate for your preferred language, platform, OS, library, framework, etc is a perfectly reasonable use of time, and if you are willing to read the contrary opinions of others, it can even be educational.
  - Domenic_S 14y ago
    > the idea that there is anyone engaged in "intellectual wanking" instead of "shipping product" is fallacious The idea that you could know what everyone is not doing at all times is fallacious. The time I'm talking about (and I thought has been implied in this thread) is the time where you sit in a meeting room/coffee shop/founder's house, during work hours, arguing about why X is a better stack than Y and why project Foo should use it instead of your "default" stack (not necessarily haskell v. php; X vs Y).
    - 14y ago

sbilstein 14y ago

agreed. Just because someone can use a pocket knife and some twine to lash together a chair in 20 minutes doesn't mean someone is going to buy that chair. Craftsmen care about their tools, and great craftsmen ship. Shitty ones can ship too, but it won't be good.

jskulski 14y ago

That's reading into it quite a bit.

papsosouid 14y ago
Honestly, I wish I could believe that. But I really don't see how I am reading anything into it. The implication that people who talk about programming languages that he doesn't want to learn about are not "shipping product" is quite clear. I don't see any way to interpret that sentiment other than as anti-intellectualism.

Domenic_S 14y ago

I guess strictly speaking it's a false dilemma to say you're either arguing endlessly or shipping, but I don't really think that was the spirit of the quote. Unless there are infinite productive hours in your day you have to choose your stack and go for it, and the less boilerplate you have to do to get your stack running, the more time you'll have for productivity. It's nuanced. We all of us owe our careers to the people who came before us asking, 'what if we could do it this way?'. But, you have to draw the line between intellectual wanking and thoughtlessness. It's a surprisingly hard line to draw - more for some than for others.

papsosouid 14y ago
>Unless there are infinite productive hours in your day you have to choose your stack and go for it But the people advocating haskell and clojure have done that. And they feel that their choice worked out so well that they should be nice enough to tell others how good it is. The people "just shipping with PHP" aren't spending their entire day coding, how is spending a half hour advocating for a programming language any different than spending that half hour watching TV (or as a more apt analogy, spending it arguing that PHP is totally good enough because I am shipping software in it so there's no need to ever try anything else)? >and the less boilerplate you have to do to get your stack running, the more time you'll have for productivity. This seems like an implication that using haskell or clojure somehow means having to deal with lots of boilerplate. That is not the case, and it is a rather odd thing to believe. This argument actually works against "just shipping in PHP". The less time you have to spend dealing with bugs that would have been prevented in another language, the more time you'll have for productivity. >But, you have to draw the line between intellectual wanking and thoughtlessness I believe the idea that there is anyone engaged in "intellectual wanking" instead of "shipping product" is fallacious. I've advocated haskell here before. Obviously I wasn't writing code while doing so, but would I have been writing code were I not advocating haskell? No, I would have been talking about something else, still not coding. Using downtime to advocate for your preferred language, platform, OS, library, framework, etc is a perfectly reasonable use of time, and if you are willing to read the contrary opinions of others, it can even be educational.
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  > the idea that there is anyone engaged in "intellectual wanking" instead of "shipping product" is fallacious The idea that you could know what everyone is not doing at all times is fallacious. The time I'm talking about (and I thought has been implied in this thread) is the time where you sit in a meeting room/coffee shop/founder's house, during work hours, arguing about why X is a better stack than Y and why project Foo should use it instead of your "default" stack (not necessarily haskell v. php; X vs Y).
  - 14y ago