141–150 of 183 posts
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In that case everything is art and the word loses all its meaning.
No, in that case everything skillfully done is art and the world around us becomes something more than mundane dross.
What we can learn from _why is non-attachment to our work and not taking everything so fucking seriously. We should see our work as art and enjoy every moment of it!
> What we can learn from _why is non-attachment to our work Non-attachment -- Exactly how? If so why delete your work ? That shows his attachment to it. iirc, there was some discontent over one of his libraries being overtaken by another (nokogiri ?). There were benchmarks that showed his lib to be slower. then he improved his lib. this went on. he did seem a bit annoyed, if i recall.
"People get way too caught up in their work. I like to think that he was able to keep the products of his online persona separate from the rest of his life, treating them as completely distinct entities - the perfect, clear-cut, division between personal life, work, and play."
"Seeing the complete deletion of his online persona doesn't terribly surprise me. Back in 2007 _why closed his main blog (RedHanded). That event truly shocked me, but it helped me to better understand him as a person. The blog, even though he had put years of work into it and people strongly identified him with it, was immaterial. It didn't feel like the right place to talk anymore so he moved on to another place, abandoning the old site."
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:) Was it Dijkstra that advocated writing everything in assembly, or am I thinking of someone else? I know he was big on formally verifying the correctness of programs, but I thought I remember him saying that for implementation purposes, he advocated assembly. Or was that more of a "if you can't write it in assembly, you don't understand all the parts" deal? It seems he hated FORTRAN, APL, BASIC, and PL/1, and only…
Dijkstra is largely emblematic of the wing of Computing Science that seems to regard programming as déclassé
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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 .
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…
Don't understand the cynical flamebait language. What's the difference between sycophancy and genuine admiration? Can a guy be a fan of another guy's work without being a sycophant? Maybe you don't get it. Fine, I don't really get Jackson Pollack, but it's no big deal to me if people like him.
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I'm not sure how he was a savvy self marketeer when nobody knew where he lived or what he did for a living or even what his real name was.
He was marketing _Why, not his real life persona. And that in fact made _Why a stronger brand. Have a look at the band 'The Cure' and Netochka Nezvanova. Both of them were amazing marketeers, and _Why worked very much in that spirit.
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He was marketing _Why, not his real life persona. And that in fact made _Why a stronger brand. Have a look at the band 'The Cure' and Netochka Nezvanova. Both of them were amazing marketeers, and _Why worked very much in that spirit.
Never heard of her. I guess people can have fame without being recognized. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova
In the beginning I thought it might be the same group.
_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.
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"Bricklaying has been 'industrialized', and one day programming will be too." This prediction has been made for decades now. I suppose if people keep predicting this indefinitely, someday it will become true. In the meantime, new programming tasks are invented faster than the old tasks are industrialized. "Once you get better at programming it is more like knitting or weaving than puzzling." This is up to you. Was bu…
> This prediction has been made for decades now. I suppose if people keep predicting this indefinitely, someday it will become true. One day is on purpose very vague, I haven't a clue on what timescale we're talking. But I'm fairly sure what will be the sign that we've reached it, it's when we will remove the term programming from language and use 'teaching' instead. > This is up to you. Was building Google, Amazon,…
You should read this, and maybe the linked academic paper, too: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm...
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Dijkstra is largely emblematic of the wing of Computing Science that seems to regard programming as déclassé
From his writing, I never got the feeling that Dijkstra himself hated programming, just that he hated most of the languages and ideas people used. Can you point to a particular essay that echoes this attitude, or is that just based on the (correct) observation that he was more a theorist, and they tend to scoff at the lowly programmer?