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

Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

alarmingdevelopment.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 67 posts

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#21

Post by kenjackson »

sdevlin wrote: post #15
kenjackson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is what you described (having to solve a problem once) different than most languages (especially those with garbage collection). It seems like you're describing libraries, ala growing a language ( http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415... ).

Lisp dialects afford you more powerful tools for abstraction. Whereas most languages provide abstraction at the function level, Lisp allows for syntactic abstraction via macros. Think of constructs like the if-statement that only evaluates one of its consequent and alternative, or short-circuiting and- and or-expressions. These things are impossible (or awkward/difficult) in most languages, but Lisp makes them relati…

It's a nice tool for abstraction, but its simply another tool. Once you have the ability to make a function that returns an arbitrary value, including other functions, and can take an arbitrary value, I think you're largely done. I can build conditionals, lazy vs eager eval, and the whole nine with this simple contruct. And sure, it starts out looking uglier, but c'mon, we're comparing to Lisp. :-)

The real question is how much of the language is built out for you already. And what type of "culture" does that build out presume or create...

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#22

Post by camccann »

klochner wrote: post #5
Jach wrote: post #2

Ha, as if attitude resides in something other than the brain. http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/power I don't think programmers are alone in this problem, however. People by nature tend to get into their own factions and bash anyone else, even if they have more in common than not. (Also note that programmers do tend to be more harsh toward non-programmers than other programmers.) Though I think programmers haven't yet…

He maybe overstepped a little, but the principle is sound: For robust, maintainable software systems, convention and simplicity trump cleverness.

In my experience, writing simple code often requires more cleverness from the programmer than does writing clever code.

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#23

Post by kscaldef »

bh23ha wrote: post #19
jwecker wrote: post #4

I'm not sure what his definition of intelligence is. Obviously not the same as mine. He states that the reason "triumphalists" annoy him so much is that he used to be one- and then goes on to explain himself programming something very unintelligent in form and function that took him 20 years to fix. I would paraphrase the post as "I used to be dumb and arrogant, but after 20 years I realize how dumb I was and why don…

That's not the way I read it. It seems to me what he meant to say is that, no matter how good and smart you are - software can outsmart you. Or in other words, debugging code is twice as hard as writing code, so if you write the smartest code you can, you will not be able to debug it. But having said that, I do think that the headline is link bait. I only agree with it if you add: "On very large, long term projects".…

> But having said that, I do think that the headline is link bait

You realize the title of TFA is "Mea Culpa", right? The "link bait" headline was written by the HN submitter.

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#24

Post by camccann »

jwecker wrote: post #4

I'm not sure what his definition of intelligence is. Obviously not the same as mine. He states that the reason "triumphalists" annoy him so much is that he used to be one- and then goes on to explain himself programming something very unintelligent in form and function that took him 20 years to fix. I would paraphrase the post as "I used to be dumb and arrogant, but after 20 years I realize how dumb I was and why don…

Glorifying "hard work" as more important than intelligence is a common mistake made by intelligent people when they finally realize that sitting around being intelligent is not, in fact, sufficient to make things happen (this is often surprisingly contrary to expectations formed during schooling).

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#25

Post by anthonyb »

abstractbill wrote: post #16
klochner wrote: post #14

Anyone read the prior post he references? This one is supposed to be acknowledging that he was too aggressive in attacking the Lisp community in his last post ("Mea Culpa"). Sounds like the author is having trouble with the humility thing: "I'm really humble, so now everyone else has to be as well" just one of the many faces of narcissism

Yes, in which he claims that all languages are equally good. In which case I assume he writes everything in assembler.

That doesn't appear to be too far from the truth:

"I spent those decades debugging the Frankenstein. In the OS crash debugger. In hex. Because wasn’t it oh so clever and efficient to build a radically new kind of database with extreme reliability requirements as a highly multithreaded kernel extension to the OS?"

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#26

Post by wisty »

camccann wrote: post #24
jwecker wrote: post #4

I'm not sure what his definition of intelligence is. Obviously not the same as mine. He states that the reason "triumphalists" annoy him so much is that he used to be one- and then goes on to explain himself programming something very unintelligent in form and function that took him 20 years to fix. I would paraphrase the post as "I used to be dumb and arrogant, but after 20 years I realize how dumb I was and why don…

Glorifying "hard work" as more important than intelligence is a common mistake made by intelligent people when they finally realize that sitting around being intelligent is not, in fact, sufficient to make things happen (this is often surprisingly contrary to expectations formed during schooling).

I think intelligence and attitude are both multipliers. The difference is, if you glorify attitude (to yourself) it can help you improve your attitude. Glorifying intelligence won't improve your intelligence so easily.

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#27

Post by blacksmythe »

wisty wrote: post #26
camccann wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glorifying "hard work" as more important than intelligence is a common mistake made by intelligent people when they finally realize that sitting around being intelligent is not, in fact, sufficient to make things happen (this is often surprisingly contrary to expectations formed during schooling).

I think intelligence and attitude are both multipliers. The difference is, if you glorify attitude (to yourself) it can help you improve your attitude. Glorifying intelligence won't improve your intelligence so easily.

Nicely put.

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#28

Post by baguasquirrel »

I agree with the idea that attitude trumps intelligence, and I humbly disagree with the idea that it's somehow "better" to hire someone smart over someone who's hard-working as others are suggesting. But what kind of dichotomy is that?

The reason why languages like Lisp appeal to me is because I don't like it when my hard work is wasted. It's pissy when you spend more time trying to circumvent their poorly conceived type system than you spend on the actual problem itself. I don't like it when my code is unnecessarily complex because of my tools.

Re: Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence

#29

Post by rbranson »

abstractbill wrote: post #16
klochner wrote: post #14

Anyone read the prior post he references? This one is supposed to be acknowledging that he was too aggressive in attacking the Lisp community in his last post ("Mea Culpa"). Sounds like the author is having trouble with the humility thing: "I'm really humble, so now everyone else has to be as well" just one of the many faces of narcissism

Yes, in which he claims that all languages are equally good. In which case I assume he writes everything in assembler.

... or Visual Basic... or COBOL... or any other language everyone has pretty much determined is awful.
Post reply on HN