Strange. For me, programming is an emotionless endeavor and one of the hardest aspects about doing it day in and day out.
Sometimes it feels like a higher level form of data entry.
How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
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Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#12"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…
I feel both, depending on how my day is going. They're both true.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#13It's an interesting question: which are the lines of code most frequently executed in the world today?
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#14"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…
Awe and contempt are basically the same feeling, but with the charge flipped. The author is amazed that it works to the degree that it does, you're amazed a how things don't work the way you want them to.
Such is the power of framing, I guess.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#15While I don't disagree with the article, this quote better sums up how I feel about programming.
> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination... Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself... The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time.
-Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month
In deference to the counterpoints in this thread, a lot of the "poetry" we actually encounter seems to have been written by Vogons.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#16Yesterday I set up a Django server that exposes some tables through an API that's fully queryable and filterable and sortable and paginated. And I wired it right into an antd table component on a Web app. And the whole thing is just so nicely interactive and #%$&ing clean and beautiful and elegant. I felt such joy making it.
Then I had a moment of thinking, "wow the CEO and friends are going to be blown away."
Until I stood back and realised that a data table isn't novel or interesting and they won't even be aware of the underlying beauty.
They're still blown away by a lot of what I do, but it's never the things that I find truly beautiful and romantic.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#17If you have multiple startups competing evenly in the same space why does one succeed and the others fail? The founders ability to execute is paramount. But of equal importance is that one product has a little bit of magic. Something that makes the user smile. If it was easy every startup would have it.
You might say they all do the same task why spend extra time so the user has an incredible experience. Because in my opinion that's how you win.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#18"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.
I'm working on an app that calls other internal services inside our company, one of them is a call to update an account balance. We were running into this issue where we were getting a 504 Gateway Timeout on the update balance call so I eventually found the Slack room for that team and asked about it.
They ignored me for a couple weeks, but I kept asking and eventually someone answered and said yeah you'll get the 504 Gateway Timeout if you try to update the account balance to the same value that it already has.
OK, that makes sense to you? What if there was an actual gateway timeout?
You would also get a 504 Gateway Timeout in that case.
They apparently have no plans to modify this service's behavior.
I let it go, I just moved on with my life. I did not find myself awed or stunned with the mountains of work and talent and creativity and foresight and intelligence and luck that went into it.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#19I 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 bra…
It becomes rather interesting in my mind the moment you think about when the thing no longer exists.
We loose so many things all the time, the ability to make stuff, the ability to repair things, even the use of drills and hammers quickly fades away for the TikTok generation.
I love the notion of the OP and applaud initiatives like the various Smalltalks or https://gpblocks.org/ that try to keep the awe in our craft alive.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#20I 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 bra…
Yes, the construction of a ballpoint pen could be made romantic. But I mean...it's pretty incredible how many humans collaborate to produce the ballpoint pen, millions of individuals cooperating in countless ways, producing an essential implement which is greater than the sum of its parts. No one involved could tell you exactly how the pen is made, and yet it's sold at a price so low we never think about it. There is a famous essay "I, Pencil" that details, and indeed romanticizes, this exact process.
You could cynically state that all aspects of civilization are incredible, so therefore nothing is. Or you could back up and marvel at the fact that out of nothing came something, out of an unthinking universe came self aware humans that literally took rocks out of the ground and reconstructed them so that they would think for us, and that we then used those thinking-rocks to cure diseases, enable near-instantaneous communication anywhere in the world, and literally launch people off this planet.
I would advise you to try thinking in the latter style, as life is more fun that way.