Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

_why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

smashingmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 183 posts

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#41

Post by jseliger »

antirez wrote: post #20
gdp wrote: post #16

Articles about _why on HN seem to always take on a particularly sycophantic quality. As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal. The ethic that people appear to ascribe to him ("programming as art") is precisely the opposite to that which I generally advocate ("programming as science"). I (and others) often suggest that the former approach is actually harmful to soft…

Programming as science: not consistent with reality IMHO. My argument is that it's pretty simple to build a good computer scientist: take a guy with good IQ and put it into a good university. But there are zero guarantees that you'll end with a good coder also, as coding is a matter of taste, tradeoffs, design decisions, creativity, ability to think out of the box, and so forth. The problem is that most of our indust…

I realize that it can be irritating to have someone come in and split the difference, but in this case the problem seems to be that programming has some elements of art and some elements of science. So if you get people who passionately want to argue one side or the other, they argue past each other. Is an elephant chiefly long skinny parts (tusks, a trunk) or chiefly big round parts (main body)? I feel like I'm hearing the long skinny and big round people arguing with each other, when the answer is closer to "both." If you're interested in making a piano keyboard, maybe you're interested in tusks; if you're interested in eating (do people eat elephants?), maybe you're interested in the body.

I think that PG in one of his essays said that CS is confusing because it's got a of people under its umbrella: some do mostly math, some are closer to artists, and some are somewhere else (I can't remember his distinctions). So the field has a lot of people saying "this is what it means," all of whom are at least somewhat correct.

What is CS or programming or whatever you want to call this thing that involves making computers do stuff? On some level, the answer drifts towards "whatever you want it to be." But the flame wars are less satisfying that way.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#42

Post by bootload »

gdp wrote: post #16

Articles about _why on HN seem to always take on a particularly sycophantic quality. As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal. The ethic that people appear to ascribe to him ("programming as art") is precisely the opposite to that which I generally advocate ("programming as science"). I (and others) often suggest that the former approach is actually harmful to soft…

"... vastly over-stating the contributions of this one guy in HN comments ..."

You are right to be cynical but this time I think you missed the mark.

The author gives numerous examples of work "Why" produced. Their merit cannot be taken away. Just as important is the effect "Why" had on the Ruby community and other programmers who I imagine are just as or even bigger cynics. There's John Resig, Zed Shaw and Fábio Akita. I've read their blogs, looked at some of their code. They don't appear sycophantic in their ideas or writing. But I don't know any of these people.

But I do know @DrNic ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/drnic I met him last year at a talk he did on "Scriptable tools" ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/3409666921/ Nic is the most cynical begger I've met - talking and interrupting the talk after his, ripping into a greeny with a largely sympathetic audience. Questions and comments both insightful and rudely cynical at the same time. I didn't sense the audience resenting this. It pushed the speaker to clarify his ideas.

So I artfully disagree. "Why" had a tangible positive effect in the core Ruby developer community who by nature are as skeptical as you can be - and then some.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#43

Post by compay »

igravious wrote: post #36
gdp wrote: post #16

Articles about _why on HN seem to always take on a particularly sycophantic quality. As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal. The ethic that people appear to ascribe to him ("programming as art") is precisely the opposite to that which I generally advocate ("programming as science"). I (and others) often suggest that the former approach is actually harmful to soft…

Yo. I would suggest that as an admitted non-fan of Ruby then you are in no position to comment. Besides, _why could draw, anyone could appreciate his stuff I'd imagine. He could play music. He had a quirky sense of humour, and was a creative and endlessly surprising person. Now, this ain't sycophantic as you call, he genuinely was these things. Sorry if that bothers you. There's this cute paper some guy once wrote, i…

"I would suggest that as an admitted non-fan of Ruby then you are in no position to comment."

I like _why too, but but by telling gdp shut up because he's not a "fan," you're actually making it much easier for him to make his point.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#44

Post by mkramlich »

starkfist wrote: post #19

He was sort of like a contemporary one-man open source Beagle Bros. Unfortunately there is no place in current programming culture for people like this. Programming is not art. It is certainly not whimsical. It is fun, but only fun like preparing for a rocket launch or hostile takeover is fun. Programming is science, it's engineering, it's methodology, it is bureaucracy. More importantly it is Serious Business. Progr…

Beagle Bros! I remember them. Ok, lets age ourselves here. I had their "Peeks, Pokes & Pointers" poster for my Apple II+. They made great stuff.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#45

Post by steveklabnik »

andrewvc wrote: post #17
jacoblyles wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_Why had an abnormal personality. He had a busy internal dialogue. He acted for his own reasons, and I don't think we will guess at them. Humans understand new things by comparison to what they already know, so fresh souls are often misunderstood and misclassified.

I think you nailed it. I'll add to that though. often, when people die (and _why did in a sense die), people view everything they did through rose colored lenses. I'm with the majority in HNers in this thread so far, still in awe of _why, however, let's not forget the tough lessons his disappearance taught us. While I greatly appreciated everything _why did for the community and think he truly was an amazing person,…

It was also lucky that the Ruby community had adopted git so thoroughly; the only reason we still have his works is due to DVCS.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#46

Post by _delirium »

gdp wrote: post #24
antirez wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming as science: not consistent with reality IMHO. My argument is that it's pretty simple to build a good computer scientist: take a guy with good IQ and put it into a good university. But there are zero guarantees that you'll end with a good coder also, as coding is a matter of taste, tradeoffs, design decisions, creativity, ability to think out of the box, and so forth. The problem is that most of our indust…

I don't consider programming to be a much greater skill than the ability to install fixed wiring in a house or balance a budget. Are small business accountants "artists"? Accordingly, programming is not _currently_ a science. However, I think that is a much better position to aspire to than self-aggrandizement and glorifying a skill that is really no different than any other skill that any suitably motivated 12 year…

I don't think the analogy's a very good one. If you want a housing analogy, I'd say it's more like architecture than ceiling-fan installation. And architecture has, hundreds of years later, never totally coalesced into a science. There are scientific and engineering sub-parts, but still significant "art" parts as well, and good architects are at least reasonably knowledgeable about both.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#47

Post by _delirium »

gdp wrote: post #28
davidalln wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think dismissing "programming as art" as irrelevant and hurtful to the community is dangerous. Here we have the tools to create a near-infinite amount of almost everything that can run on a computer. We use code to run complicated robots that can drive a course without human input, solve the most complicated mathematic problems of today, and create artificial intelligence with the ability to learn as it ages. Yet a…

I agree that computing as an activity has manifestations that could be understood to be art, but that doesn't make _programming_ art. Glorifying programming as an art is like glorifying spelling as salient to the quality of Shakespeare's plays. Programming is the act of expressing programs. Coming up with interesting things for those programs to do definitely follows a creative process of human inspiration, but actua…

I'd strongly disagree with that. I'd argue: it's rarely a normative process, and can (and should!) be made less normative. In fact, almost the only times it can be considered close to normative are when it's in a huge organization banging out boilerplate code, because in that case you've already assumed a fixed structure and placed "programming" into a niche within it, and declared that the structure isn't currently up for reevaluation.

But I don't think that fundamentally you can separate the act of expressing programs from the act of coming up with interesting things for them to do. The materials of the medium constrain what is possible or easy to express, and it's quite hard to produce anything good if you try to artificially separate them into levels of specification vs. implementation.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#48

Post by amix »

gdp wrote: post #16

Articles about _why on HN seem to always take on a particularly sycophantic quality. As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal. The ethic that people appear to ascribe to him ("programming as art") is precisely the opposite to that which I generally advocate ("programming as science"). I (and others) often suggest that the former approach is actually harmful to soft…

_why's influence isn't only in code, but in thinking. And if you look around, for example on github, you will see a lot of people hacking away for fun, trying out new stuff and just doing something they love to do. Did _why start this trend? He didn't, but he was a big advocate of it.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#49

Post by _delirium »

viraptor wrote: post #38
grandalf wrote: post #18

_why's view on messy code is drastically under-appreciated. One can imagine how much energy is wasted revising commits and over-massaging code just to make the author look smarter. I'd love it if the culture were more accepting of ugly code... It has its purpose too.

I have a completely different feeling. It's ok if you depend on such code as long as it's actively supported by the creator himself. As soon as you need to modify it for your needs, or adopt the whole project, because it was dropped -- you start to appreciate clean and consistent code. If the code is too messy, you just end up rewriting most of it, in order to understand it. There would be no reason to do that if the…

There are different kinds of cleanliness though, I think. I've often found it easier to modify idiosyncratic code than code written in the Standard way, though things vary in both kinds. I do agree documentation is rather important; well-commented idiosyncratic code that explains the author's mental model is light-years easier than idiosyncratic code without any explanation.

But, I do find that code written in sort of industry-standard style often is hugely over-architected, with a lot of boilerplate and cruft, and not all that easy to modify if I want to adapt it to my personal ends; i.e. my use-case is a single programmer wanting to put in 5-10 hours to make a small to moderate change. You end up in a maze of Factories and Interfaces trying to figure out where anything is actually done. The idiosyncratic code often just does away with all that architecture, which can sometimes be easier to deal with.

Re: _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

#50

Post by barrkel »

gdp wrote: post #24
antirez wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming as science: not consistent with reality IMHO. My argument is that it's pretty simple to build a good computer scientist: take a guy with good IQ and put it into a good university. But there are zero guarantees that you'll end with a good coder also, as coding is a matter of taste, tradeoffs, design decisions, creativity, ability to think out of the box, and so forth. The problem is that most of our indust…

I don't consider programming to be a much greater skill than the ability to install fixed wiring in a house or balance a budget. Are small business accountants "artists"? Accordingly, programming is not _currently_ a science. However, I think that is a much better position to aspire to than self-aggrandizement and glorifying a skill that is really no different than any other skill that any suitably motivated 12 year…

Radically disagree with you there. Wiring is in principle really simple - make sure the right wires are connected, insulated properly with appropriate safeguards; accounting is similar, where there are essentially only four kinds of things.

Putting together a large piece of software, or optimizing a particular path in a large codebase, or putting together a creative solution to a class of problems, requires a much higher level of thinking. You need to bring together far more concepts at different levels of the abstraction stack, and have enough of them in your mind to arrange them without them interacting poorly at one level when you're coordinating them at a different level.

Programming is more like building a whole new kind of house, without a plan, or altering an existing house, without it all falling down around your ears.

As to subjectivity: you're wrong that software quality can be measured objectively, because of two simple facts: software isn't static - it must be modified over time - and humans are limited in their capacity for complexity. The abstraction which yields most readily to the changes that matter, such that those abstractions mesh well with those people doing the modifications, are subjectively good - their worth is dependent on the observer.

Post reply on HN