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I struggled with how to phrase that and eventually gave up hoping the ridiculous number I supplied would suffice. I agree w/ everything you said, but I'd argue

by jghn 12y ago

I struggled with how to phrase that and eventually gave up hoping the ridiculous number I supplied would suffice. I agree w/ everything you said, but I'd argue that oodles of software jobs out there are solving solved problems and doing it over and over and over again and these were the sorts of jobs I was trying to evoke.

vinceguidry 12y ago
The argument I'm trying to make is that it's not the job that's boring, it's the programmer that refuses to find something interesting about the job out of the mistaken belief that it's tedious or that it's a solved problem. It's not a solved problem. If it were solved, there would be a software package out there with a huge community, loads of extensions, that you could just use and be done with it. You wouldn't need any programming talent, just a guy smart enough to run an installer. Blogging is a specific case of CRUD that has just such a software package, Wordpress. Even so, Wordpress isn't the perfect solution to all instances of the blogging problem. Maybe you want a static one, maybe you want one in Haskell. Each combination is quite interesting in its own right. Hell, there's lots of things that Wordpress could be doing better. There's lots of things out there that are half-solved, like the more general case of CRUD. Here there are frameworks that allow you to solve specific CRUD problems, but each specific instance of CRUD, for it to really be solved, needs its own software package just like Wordpress with a huge community and easy installer. The vast majority of them don't, so you can't call them solved. That means there's still interesting things to learn about them. Remember 2048? I remember a lot of people saying it wasn't a terribly interesting game. Bullshit it's not! I'm building a Ruby library to run the game, (didn't like any of the ones I found) then I'm going to start building an AI engine to solve it using heuristics. When I play 2048, I've gotten up to 8192 a few times, and would love to be able to program an AI to play like I play. To build tooling to help me visualize my AI programming and watch it operate. 2048 is plenty interesting, if you don't think so, it's you that's the problem, not 2048.

by jghn 12y ago

vinceguidry 12y ago

The argument I'm trying to make is that it's not the job that's boring, it's the programmer that refuses to find something interesting about the job out of the mistaken belief that it's tedious or that it's a solved problem. It's not a solved problem. If it were solved, there would be a software package out there with a huge community, loads of extensions, that you could just use and be done with it. You wouldn't need any programming talent, just a guy smart enough to run an installer. Blogging is a specific case of CRUD that has just such a software package, Wordpress. Even so, Wordpress isn't the perfect solution to all instances of the blogging problem. Maybe you want a static one, maybe you want one in Haskell. Each combination is quite interesting in its own right. Hell, there's lots of things that Wordpress could be doing better. There's lots of things out there that are half-solved, like the more general case of CRUD. Here there are frameworks that allow you to solve specific CRUD problems, but each specific instance of CRUD, for it to really be solved, needs its own software package just like Wordpress with a huge community and easy installer. The vast majority of them don't, so you can't call them solved. That means there's still interesting things to learn about them. Remember 2048? I remember a lot of people saying it wasn't a terribly interesting game. Bullshit it's not! I'm building a Ruby library to run the game, (didn't like any of the ones I found) then I'm going to start building an AI engine to solve it using heuristics. When I play 2048, I've gotten up to 8192 a few times, and would love to be able to program an AI to play like I play. To build tooling to help me visualize my AI programming and watch it operate. 2048 is plenty interesting, if you don't think so, it's you that's the problem, not 2048.