> The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. He spoke to the people who were not actively voicing their opinions and who were overshadowed by the vocal few who were supporting the war. This is a shocking misunderstanding of history. The “silent majority” Nixon spoke of were folks opposed to anti-war protests . Nixon intentionally prolonged…
The silent majority in software
101–110 of 371 posts
Re: The silent majority in software
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you ever find yourself about to say that Nixon did something that a non-evil person would do, you’d better triple check your facts. Actually Nixon did several things "a non-evil person would do", Nixon as evil is a carricature. Like giving back Native American lands, or green-lighting the first major environmental protection legislation, or to get talking with China. And of course the Vietnam war itself was esca…
Yes. The first thing the chinese government did after Nixon ended sanctions and allowed trade, was to order 12 fertiliser plants from R W Kellogs (not the cornflakes one). Giant things that squeeze ammonia out of the atmosphere. That meant climbing out of a starvation cycle. Nixon going to China probably saved 100s of millions of lives. Chinese lives of course but lives. Sadly for Nixon the lives he saved did not vot…
Re: The silent majority in software
#103There are a lot of developers out there, tens of millions. That little bubble of users actually commenting on HN is tiny in comparison. So, yes it's good to be aware of that and appreciate the world is bigger than that. At the same time, like with politics, just because they are silent does not mean they don't have opinions. And they vote. With their feet. They'll adopt practices, tools, and technology they like or need and walk away from other things.
Re: The silent majority in software
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am regularly up at night in a cold sweat worrying about how if I suddenly needed to find a new job I’d have to learn some sort of front end JavaScript framework.
Could be worse. I am regularly up at night in a cold sweat worrying about how if I suddenly find a technically fulfilling job, realizing I forgot everything about computers after a decade on working on meaningless front end JavaScript framework.
Re: The silent majority in software
#105> The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. He spoke to the people who were not actively voicing their opinions and who were overshadowed by the vocal few who were supporting the war. This is a shocking misunderstanding of history. The “silent majority” Nixon spoke of were folks opposed to anti-war protests . Nixon intentionally prolonged…
That's a very specific wording; were these people also pro-war, or did they just not like the protests themselves?
I think that's an important distinction to make. In my country we've had farmer's protests (environmental legislation has caused the government to target some farmers, things like forced buy-outs. It's all on paper and wouldn't affect that many people or the food supply since 65% is exported anyway, but still); while a lot of people agree and stand with the farmers, what they don't agree with is the protests they've done where they block the highways, first with just slow moving tractors as they made their way to the government seat, more recently with barricades, manure and burning hay bales. That affects people directly, the upsdie-down flags and slogans on fields along the roadside don't.
Re: The silent majority in software
#106> Usually, the comments on HN/Reddit are polarised by a single group of people who have the same opinion, Can't speak for Reddit, but that's not at all the case here. For example, I often speak of my hatred of microservices here. I'll get some upvotes and agreement, some people telling me it's a dumb opinion, and some people telling me we're doing it wrong and explain their right way. Believe it or not, I learn a lot…
I think Programmer Anarchy was a early adopter of microservices and as they ran a business as developers I think this may have been useful
Re: The silent majority in software
#107Why is being heard a good thing? When I was at school I was the insufferable kid who always put their hand up as I knew the answer. Thinking somehow that the teacher wanted to know the answer. What I learned as I grew up is a lesson learned is better than a lesson told.
Re: The silent majority in software
#108Re: The silent majority in software
#109Places like this, get caught up in “shiny,” and that doesn’t always reflect reality.
For example, it is fashionable, hereabout, to throw shade on PHP.
I present Exhibit A, the “Fishtank Graph”[1].
We were just discussing something similar, yesterday, in the SwiftUI thread[2].
[0] https://vickiboykis.com/2019/05/10/it-runs-on-java-8/
[1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...
Re: The silent majority in software
#110What I'm NOT in favor of is the disrespect of legacy. There are millions of systems out there in the world in manufacturing environments. These systems are ancient, I worked in a shop making gears for 5 years. The CNC lathe we used had a GE computer running it from 1970, and it used mylar punched tape to store programs. It was a huge investment when it was purchased, and there was an old guy (about 70) who they called for repairs on it and much of the other ancient hardware. This shop had 6 employees, including me. At it's peak, there were 50 or so, during and after the Viet Nam war.
That hardware was sooooo old, but it still worked, reliably turning out the same few types of shafts and other parts we need to turn into gears and splines and other gear shaped objects (like turbine blades).
The programmer in me desperately wanted to keep the lathe, the motor, and just replace the control system with GRBL, but even if that was free, and worked the first time, the risk that an upgrade represented was completely unacceptable.
When you're in a job shop, there are parts you've been making for a generation in small quantities (less than 500). Those parts are relied upon by other businesses as part of their product. If you "upgrade" any part of your process, you risk producing a part which doesn't work somewhere down the supply chain. If you make that happen too many times, you'll lose your customers.
It's also important to know that gear cutting was only a step in the production chain... we didn't start from raw materials most of the time, we were given a "blank" on which to cut teeth, that already had many operations performed on it. It was almost never just a matter of sawing off a new piece of metal and starting over. You had to respect the work already put into a gear blank, or shaft to cut splines on.
The incentives in manufacturing are strongly against any type of change. However, they aren't blindly obeyed. If there are new jobs, then it's reasonable to try out the new machines or new systems in those cases. If something can cut the cost of a part by half, then it might be worth the risk, if the customer approves a change.
Please don't think that those in the silent majority of the world are un-reflective of the needs for security and other patches... but if things break every Wednesday, they'll disable Windows Updates forever, for very good reason.