How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
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How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
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Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#2I would happily write code for free (and do so off-hours, with my kids, and for side projects).
I have the luxury of working in a field where my employer pays me not because I hate what I’m doing and would rather not do it all, but just because they need me to focus on solving puzzles they choose instead of puzzles I choose.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#3How? Writing resource hogging code all day to figure out how to best display obtrusive advertisements is a good start.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#4"After a while, more and more, you’ll find yourself in moments of awe, stunned by the size and fragility of it all; the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it. And you’ll reach for the word “magic” because you won’t know how else to describe it and then you lean back and smile, wondering how someone could not."
I guess I wish I felt like that about programming. But more and more, I feel like this:
"You are an expert in all these technologies, and that’s a good thing, because that expertise let you spend only six hours figuring out what went wrong, as opposed to losing your job. You now have one extra little fact to tuck away in the millions of little facts you have to memorize because so many of the programs you depend on are written by dicks and idiots."
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#5Truly fantastic stuff. I don't really have anything to add other than to say that this made me feel happy about what I do for a living. So much better than reading flamewars camouflaged as blogposts :)
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#6I dont really understand the point of this article. Literally any system can be made romantic for the sheer fact that everything has spent hundreds of man-hours building up to it.
The cheapest possible ballpoint pen is made up of years of research into the plastics, the machinery required to create bearings with the tolerances necessary, the exact chemical makeup of the ink etc etc. It just seems to be a waste of brain-space to bother with making everything romantic.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#7Romantic? A relationship can be a metaphor for almost anything. Currently I feel abused not by programming but by other programmers. How can you be romantic about programmers? (more broadly: How can you be romantic about people?) I agree with the title paradoxically.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#8"After a while, more and more, you’ll find yourself in moments of awe, stunned by the size and fragility of it all; the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it. And you’ll reach for the word “magic” because you won’t know how else to describe it and then you lean back and smile, wondering how someone could not." I guess I wish I felt like that about progra…
> because so many of the programs you depend on are written by dicks and idiots
Out of all the problems with programming as a job, this is around the bottom of my list.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#9"After a while, more and more, you’ll find yourself in moments of awe, stunned by the size and fragility of it all; the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it. And you’ll reach for the word “magic” because you won’t know how else to describe it and then you lean back and smile, wondering how someone could not." I guess I wish I felt like that about progra…
Or this:
“Find creative ways around standards, limits, laws, processes, morals, etc. so I can make a quick buck and pass you some table scraps”
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#10"After a while, more and more, you’ll find yourself in moments of awe, stunned by the size and fragility of it all; the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it. And you’ll reach for the word “magic” because you won’t know how else to describe it and then you lean back and smile, wondering how someone could not." I guess I wish I felt like that about progra…
Or this: “Find creative ways around standards, limits, laws, processes, morals, etc. so I can make a quick buck and pass you some table scraps”
Or worse than table scraps: pieces of paper that may be worth something someday if you keep working hard enough.