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I'm irritated by your negativity. :-) He's admitting his mistakes and he's making progress. These are good things. If you don't like it, you can just ignore it,

by 10ren 17y ago

I'm irritated by your negativity. :-) He's admitting his mistakes and he's making progress. These are good things. If you don't like it, you can just ignore it, like the rest of the vast internet. Why take special care to put down this bit of the internet? In your longer career, I'm sure you've learnt more profound things from your mistakes. Why don't you share those mistakes and what you learnt (or link to them if you already have)? If you don't, you are not as good as the blogger you are criticizing... If your own standards are so high that you don't think you yourself are yet at a 'I should blog about this' level yet, I'm sure you're wrong. Others could learn from you; and you'd learn from understanding and articulating your mistakes. About his "Too much documentation" point: In a simple recursive descent parser, I've javadoc-commented each function with its production. Yet even this minimal documentation gets out of date... I think the right solution here is code that reads the productions directly, so it becomes self-documenting - and it stays in sync automatically. :-) (lex/yacc etc etc etc aren't appropriate for this project). I think this kind of approach is the ultimate solution to the documentation problem, but it's a lot of work to create the right tools. EDIT One purpose of my project is to do that (i.e. read productions), but I wasted a couple of months trying to make it self-hosting (as Alan Kay suggests, and smalltalk and lisp do) before I'd solved the fundamental problems. Better to address the fundamentals one by one, in isolation, instead of trying to make it do everything at once. That's something I learnt. BTW: No offence meant, just happily challengingly provocatively yours, in solidarity. :-)

ThinkWriteMute 17y ago
Learning from your mistakes is fine. Telling others what you learned is fine. Learning the wrong things from your mistakes is fine. Telling others the wrong things you learned from your mistakes and passing them off as truths is bad.
known 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
jacquesm 17y ago
I try to tell others about my lessons from the past and I try to be as specific as I can, check my posting history for some examples. Currently working on a piece about online credit card processing and everything that goes in to that, writing something like that takes time and effort, not some half hour blog posting. What bothers me most about these 'mistakes' is that while most of them are common mistakes the solutions provided send readers off in to the woods. I can imagine someone with a 5 year career to come up with a lot more substantial stuff than this, essentially the author shows a pretty myopic view of what programming is all about and has learned a few very superficial lessons and in my opinion provides the wrong answers to lessons learned. I could pick it apart point-by-point but I think that should serve as enough warning if you're relatively new to this stuff and you read this like it is a piece of profound insight.
- 10ren 17y ago
  Thanks for replying. Your first comment didn't mention that he provided the wrong answers (most of it was about the word "career"). They seem (to me) to be common issues, and he mostly has the right idea. Rather than pick it apart point-by-point, could you pick just one point he's wrong on? When a person makes disparaging generalizations, it sounds like they have prejudged the work, without reading it (why waste time reading it - they know it's bad). Maybe you're right, but it's hard to tell if you give only judgment and no evidence. Therefore I ask "can you elaborate please?" :-) BTW: I followed your suggestion, and found this excellent comment of yours about pitching to VCs (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=866299 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=866299), and I agree a lot of time and effort went into it. So I stand corrected on that issue, and my apologies for suggesting otherwise! :-) (though I'm sure much more blood sweat and tears went into the getting of your experience than in the writing - maybe that's true for the blogger too?) aside: it's weird - I upvoted, but your comment is still at 1 point... I've seen this happen before when I upvote a reply to me. It may be a bug, perhaps related to downvotes being disabled on replies to one's own comments. PS: this exchange made me think about my own mistakes. They are very specific to my area, and then to be against the received wisdom (e.g. Alan Kay above). But it's not immediately clear to me what my mistakes have been, and what I've learned... it seems like it would be a useful exercise to consider this.

by 10ren 17y ago

ThinkWriteMute 17y ago

Learning from your mistakes is fine. Telling others what you learned is fine. Learning the wrong things from your mistakes is fine. Telling others the wrong things you learned from your mistakes and passing them off as truths is bad.

known 17y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

jacquesm 17y ago

I try to tell others about my lessons from the past and I try to be as specific as I can, check my posting history for some examples. Currently working on a piece about online credit card processing and everything that goes in to that, writing something like that takes time and effort, not some half hour blog posting. What bothers me most about these 'mistakes' is that while most of them are common mistakes the solutions provided send readers off in to the woods. I can imagine someone with a 5 year career to come up with a lot more substantial stuff than this, essentially the author shows a pretty myopic view of what programming is all about and has learned a few very superficial lessons and in my opinion provides the wrong answers to lessons learned. I could pick it apart point-by-point but I think that should serve as enough warning if you're relatively new to this stuff and you read this like it is a piece of profound insight.

10ren 17y ago
Thanks for replying. Your first comment didn't mention that he provided the wrong answers (most of it was about the word "career"). They seem (to me) to be common issues, and he mostly has the right idea. Rather than pick it apart point-by-point, could you pick just one point he's wrong on? When a person makes disparaging generalizations, it sounds like they have prejudged the work, without reading it (why waste time reading it - they know it's bad). Maybe you're right, but it's hard to tell if you give only judgment and no evidence. Therefore I ask "can you elaborate please?" :-) BTW: I followed your suggestion, and found this excellent comment of yours about pitching to VCs (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=866299 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=866299), and I agree a lot of time and effort went into it. So I stand corrected on that issue, and my apologies for suggesting otherwise! :-) (though I'm sure much more blood sweat and tears went into the getting of your experience than in the writing - maybe that's true for the blogger too?) aside: it's weird - I upvoted, but your comment is still at 1 point... I've seen this happen before when I upvote a reply to me. It may be a bug, perhaps related to downvotes being disabled on replies to one's own comments. PS: this exchange made me think about my own mistakes. They are very specific to my area, and then to be against the received wisdom (e.g. Alan Kay above). But it's not immediately clear to me what my mistakes have been, and what I've learned... it seems like it would be a useful exercise to consider this.