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

The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

hasen.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 239 posts

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#51

Post by Cpoll »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #46

I appreciate the attempt at honesty, but it's not true that you're too stupid. You're too lazy. A trained monkey could learn these things (I know, because I learned them!) and you're not stupid if you know how to program. There's no shame in being lazy. Let's call a spade a spade.

It's not an attempt at honesty, it's either allegorical or satire. Other recent posts by author are an article about BoltDB and B-Trees, https://hasen.substack.com/p/indexing-querying-boltdb. Juxtapose with "I'm not smart enough to figure out SQL queries."

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#52

Post by temporallobe »

Bitter humor aside, I think this is a pretty good lament about the current state of software development and its often seemingly unnecessary layers of complexity. But all those things were invented to solve particular complex problems. The issues is that somehow we keep telling ourselves that we need to use these complex solutions to solve simple problems. One of my favorite examples of this is the inappropriate use of XML as a data format - it was intended to be a markup language, but of course it is flexible enough to be a data format, so people started using it like that, and then it became the standard (thank goodness that is changing now).

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#54

Post by CM30 »

EnragedParrot wrote: post #41
CM30 wrote: post #35

Honestly, the truly 'smart' programmer isn't someone who does or doesn't use a bunch of techniques or best practices, it's the one who can look at the situation and do what's right for that particular project/job. Most of the things in this post could be the right answer if the project is a weekend side project that's going to get a few hundred views a month, or a website for a small business. Bob's Restaurant doesn'…

There's also the fact that those complex solutions aren't engineered by a solo developer but by teams, typically even multiple teams each working on a compartmentalized piece of the whole thing.

That too. It's a lot easier to work on a complex project if you've got a large team working on it. Like the teams that the 10s of thousands of devs at your average FAANG company can staff.

Well, that and how most complex projects didn't start that way. A lot of the time, these things were built in a much simpler way, and dealing with increasing demand over the last decade or two caused them to balloon in complexity.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#55

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

mcv wrote: post #3

I can't tell if this is an honest call to keep things simple, or if it's meant to ridicule that idea. Because I strongly, deeply agree with some of these points, and am absolutely horrified by some of the others.

This appears to be someone railing against these practices, but in terms of "defending" them.

Some are universal, but some, only apply to certain domains.

I'm not really a fan of tearing down others, but I do feel the industry has a lot of room for improvement. Not sure if these types of screeds will actually make things better, though.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#56

Post by nonbirithm »

memefrog wrote: post #15

This post is the programmer equivalent of teenage girls posting photos of themselves captioned with "I'm so ugly" to farm praise from their friends. I have come to dislike this growing trend that celebrates mediocrity and failure. Posting proudly that you are stupid, terrible and incompetent seems to result in applause and high praise. Why? Why is that a good thing? I hope this was intended to be a parody.

It may be similar to the idea that if you are deemed to have imposter syndrome, then you cannot be an actual imposter, so if people perceive you to have imposter syndrome then it's in some ways a good thing.

It's impossible to know if the author has imposter syndrome or not without some way of measuring his competence. However, I think "imposter" has become a loaded term as a result of the syndrome it's associated with. There are cases describing workplace incompetence, or not being qualified for a job, or being rejected for cheating at interviews, but there is no discussion of imposters in those cases. They're just deemed incompetent or not the right fit and moved on from. Actual imposters who game interviews and do manage to land jobs aren't called imposters either, they're called dishonest, but there's no "dishonesty syndrome."

So I hesitate to reach for explanations of imposter syndrome if I'm not actually qualified for something. It can become used as a crutch to fall back on like a lot of diagnoses, instead of addressing the root causes of qualification. Waking up on that cycle made me realize I have a lot to work on in some areas.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#57

Post by mjr00 »

mettamage wrote: post #42
mcv wrote: post #3

I can't tell if this is an honest call to keep things simple, or if it's meant to ridicule that idea. Because I strongly, deeply agree with some of these points, and am absolutely horrified by some of the others.

I think he's just rebelling a bit against the culture of caring about scale and performance. A culture that has been pushed out by FAANG that also has some academic undertones. The subtext he's giving is: it doesn't really matter. That's what I read into it, because that's what I identify with. I've met so many fellow CS students (back in the day) who cared about performance optimization. I never cared. I just wanted…

A lot of these things aren't about scale and performance, but maintainability. Once you get over the initial learning curve, things like static typing, Docker, cloud services managed with Terraform, etc. don't require that that much up-front effort and save you a lot of time in the long-run.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#58

Post by HideousKojima »

jamil7 wrote: post #26
mcv wrote: post #3

I can't tell if this is an honest call to keep things simple, or if it's meant to ridicule that idea. Because I strongly, deeply agree with some of these points, and am absolutely horrified by some of the others.

Yeah, I really can't tell if it's satire. Especially things like this: > I’m not smart enough to figure out how to transform data between different layers of the system, so I just don’t. I use the same represetnation in the UI layer and the storage layer. OK, well then you might need to gather a little more work experience and meet the repercussions of decisions like this one. Or maybe the OP is a contractor and neve…

And they'll also run into major liability issues when they leak customer credit card information, SSN, or something similar because they have a single class that represents the table in the database and they use it in both the frontend and backend.

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#59

Post by bbor »

onion2k wrote: post #32
madeofpalk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skeptical of the person who is "not smart enough to figure out docker", yet is smart enough to know about building a "web application into a self contained statically linked binary executable file". I think they are smart enough, they just don't want to, or don't see the value in it (even if they've made an uninformed decision)

If you take 'figuring out Docker' as an open-ended problem then it makes sense. Getting an app running in a container is relatively easy, but that isn't really 'figuring out Docker'. That's just scratching the surface. Learning how to optimize that container, make it secure, put it in a registry so you can reuse it, etc means there's a lot to get through before you can say "I've got Docker figured out." There's no 'D…

Idk this person claims they “can’t” figure out HTTP verbs and REST. I’d say there’s a very good chance “figure out docker” means “run a program in a container”

Re: The Stupid Programmer Manifesto

#60

Post by nerdchum »

jamil7 wrote: post #26
mcv wrote: post #3

I can't tell if this is an honest call to keep things simple, or if it's meant to ridicule that idea. Because I strongly, deeply agree with some of these points, and am absolutely horrified by some of the others.

Yeah, I really can't tell if it's satire. Especially things like this: > I’m not smart enough to figure out how to transform data between different layers of the system, so I just don’t. I use the same represetnation in the UI layer and the storage layer. OK, well then you might need to gather a little more work experience and meet the repercussions of decisions like this one. Or maybe the OP is a contractor and neve…

Transforming state data between different layers of the system if done wrong is one of the biggest nightmares in my opinion you could have.
Post reply on HN