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Keep your identity small (2009)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Keep your identity small (2009)

#21

Post by montecarl »

phantom_oracle wrote: post #17

> Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions. What I don't get is who/what determines a threshold? A university degree? 10 years of experience? As others have rightly pointed out, perhaps there is no such thing as a "threshold of expertise". Any programmer could have 10 years of experience repeatedly cookie-cutting their be…

People determine the threshold themselves. Most people won't join in conversations about science or math topics unless they feel like they have a solid grasp of what is being discussed (relative to those around them). However, almost everyone feels like they have valid points to make on religious and political topics regardless of how well educated they are on those topics.

Re: Keep your identity small (2009)

#22

Post by clock_tower »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #19
dylz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's discuss text editors. Anyone?

Well, I'm an emacs guy, because I've used it for 30 years, and the commands are burned into my fingertips by now. I'll admit that vi is more logical and easier to learn, though. And I don't get "religious" about editors except in jest...

I think that's what it comes down to: vi is easier to learn, but emacs is much more powerful. My current job involves using a very esoteric in-house language, which doesn't have any IDEs or even Notepad++ text-formatting extensions; I'm thinking about learning emacs, which can be programmed relatively easily to become little less than an IDE for it.

(Speaking of, behold another holy war: IDEs versus command-line development...)

Re: Keep your identity small (2009)

#23

Post by ythl »

AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #15
dylz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's discuss text editors. Anyone?

lol @ Vim users that have to write configuration files, memorize complicated keyboard shortcuts, and install 20 plugins just to be able to copy and paste text between files. It's 2016, try using a real editor like Atom. (Am I doing it right?)

Atom? What is this, 2015? Sublime is still king, Atom was a passing fad.

Re: Keep your identity small (2009)

#24

Post by snowwrestler »

dylz wrote: post #3
angersock wrote: post #2

As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums? Um, Graham is more than a little off here. Like, by a country mile.

Let's discuss text editors. Anyone?

I like, and frequently use, nano. There, I said it.

Now vim and emacs users can both mock my child-like ignorance of real text editing.

Re: Keep your identity small (2009)

#26

Post by nostrademons »

jshevek wrote: post #13

" Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?" I do not believe this author had much experience discussing JS on forums.

I thought of commenting on that as one thing in this article that didn't really stand the test of time. As a sibling comment points out, the JS world was very different in 2009, and we didn't have the same kind of flamewars that we do now.

I think that's actually a point in favor of the article. In 2009, virtually nobody considered themselves a "Javascript programmer". Rather, Javascript was a skill that you used to build webapps, which itself was a skill you used as part of a larger software system. It was pointless to get emotionally invested in Javascript arguments on the Internet, because whether you won or lost, you still needed Rails/Django on the server, and SQL or C++/Java on the backend.

Sometime between 2009 and 2015, Javascript became a tribe, where you could invest enough of your life in it that discussions about it became a matter of identity. And its growth became threatening enough to other programming "tribes" (eg. Windows programmers, Rails programmers) that you could suddenly have very heated discussions about it on the Internet.

Re: Keep your identity small (2009)

#29

Post by jayvanguard »

angersock wrote: post #2

As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums? Um, Graham is more than a little off here. Like, by a country mile.

Is he though? Questions on the most performant way to iterate over something rarely result in flame wars.

I believe you are thinking of people arguing over JS frameworks or whether JS sucks or not. Both are identity related.

When it comes down to arguing the specific mechanics of comparing how framework X uses MVC vs how framework Y uses it, you don't see so much conflict because it is expertise, not identity driven.

Re: Keep your identity small (2009)

#30

Post by danieltillett »

snowwrestler wrote: post #24
dylz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's discuss text editors. Anyone?

I like, and frequently use, nano. There, I said it. Now vim and emacs users can both mock my child-like ignorance of real text editing.

I will join in on the love for nano. If you are just doing simple things like editing config files it is all you need. I don't use vim often enough ever get really comfortable with it.
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