less "people engineering" and more "technical engineering"
What do you mean by people engineering?
Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion
#12While it's valid to say that for most software jobs you won't be having to write tree search algorithms 10 times a day, you'll still need to use the intuition and body of knowledge that solving such problems requires more often than you think, even if it doesn't present itself as a whiteboard trivia problem.
I think it's a gate keeping strategy. Make the bar so high that only a few can get in.
They might filter out some exceptional candidate and let in some regurgitator.
But I agree of you can grasp those fundamental concepts you're a great programmer.
Some of these concept became clearer, years after college
Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion
#13A lot of the complexity you see in code, tool or project are Job-Security sub projects. At first you have a bright eyes junior dev who wants to do the right thing, change the world they said. Little by little he realizes that documenting everything, writing easy to follow and bug free code is a great way to be out of a job. Complex code is what gets you promoted because you have fire to put out, bugs to fix, getting…
I imagine there are people who face a decision like this at some point in their career, and maybe it seems like the right one at the time, but it feels like optimizing for a local maximum as opposed to a global one.
This may work to keep your current job, but should you need to find another job for any reason, how will you sell yourself to the next company, other than trying to bullshit your way in?
Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion
#14My unpopular opinion is that computing is stuck in a local maximum based on technology from the 1970s. In particular, typing into an 80x25 terminal window with unformatted fixed-width characters should be obsolete; we don't need compatibility with punch cards any more. There was a thread a week ago about displaying graphs in your terminal using ASCII graphics. This shouldn't be necessary! Also, code shouldn't be a se…
So instead of editing and compiling text files what should we be doing instead?
I don't have the solution; I just see the problem :-) Programs could be in some sort of database rather than a set of files, so the code you're interested in gets displayed without you caring about how it is broken down into a sequence of lines in a file. Sort of like how a database shows you the data you want, rather than needing to put entries in the right order. You shouldn't need to think about how your methods are ordered in the file or even what file they go into.
The display could be more like a smart word processor, where you can format code however you want. (A feature that the Xerox Alto provided.) You should be able to stick images in your code to describe things, rather than creating ASCII graphics. Tabs vs spaces shouldn't even exist.
Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
So instead of editing and compiling text files what should we be doing instead?
I don't have the solution; I just see the problem :-) Programs could be in some sort of database rather than a set of files, so the code you're interested in gets displayed without you caring about how it is broken down into a sequence of lines in a file. Sort of like how a database shows you the data you want, rather than needing to put entries in the right order. You shouldn't need to think about how your methods a…
Oddly that was how BASIC worked in the actual 70s. line numbers were virtual. Though I think the implementation left much to be desired.
Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion
#16- I like data structures and algorithms interviews.
- Writing Rust is generally unpleasant - trying to figure out how to do something that you don’t yet know how to do is much more painful than doing the same in another language.
- Unit tests are overrated.
Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion
#17ASICs are cheaper and better than most people believe. Companies are unnecessarily scared of them due to costs associated with the newest processes.
Embedded linux is more trouble than its worth 6.5/10 times
A lot of PCB developrs pretty much refuse to perform proper V&V on their designs because they're allowed to push it off on firmware engineers.
Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
So instead of editing and compiling text files what should we be doing instead?
I don't have the solution; I just see the problem :-) Programs could be in some sort of database rather than a set of files, so the code you're interested in gets displayed without you caring about how it is broken down into a sequence of lines in a file. Sort of like how a database shows you the data you want, rather than needing to put entries in the right order. You shouldn't need to think about how your methods a…
Smalltalk basically did that. The code can be serialized to text (and usually is) but in the system it's just in a database. What file represents what source code, doesn't matter to the user. The system can create directories and files as needed to represent it in whatever the sane way to represent it is. You're just editing the code and not dealing with the mundane and tedious serialization bits. You don't have to get into nonsensical wars about what goes in what file or what directory, you just care about packages, classes, and methods.
Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
So instead of editing and compiling text files what should we be doing instead?
I don't have the solution; I just see the problem :-) Programs could be in some sort of database rather than a set of files, so the code you're interested in gets displayed without you caring about how it is broken down into a sequence of lines in a file. Sort of like how a database shows you the data you want, rather than needing to put entries in the right order. You shouldn't need to think about how your methods a…
The database analogy breaks down pretty quickly though. Instead of deciding what file to put something in, you have to decide which table. And you're not going to have a single database for all your code, so you'll have to decide which database to put the code in, and which table within that database.
And now we're created libraries and packages.
Not to mention that sometimes a database gets too big and performance goes down, so maybe we want to split it up or shard it or something. And I haven't even mentioned all the database types out there, relational, document, graph, time-series...
Re: Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion
#20The fact that (evidently) you can't have some kind of seamless end-to-end connection between a relational database and "front-end user interface" data display/entry fields, with some kind of uniform/standardized DSL in-between to manipulate & validate, strikes me as totally FUBAR.