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

Mastering Programming (2016)

tidyfirst.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 123 posts

Re: Mastering Programming (2016)

#41

Post by philk10 »

perihelions wrote: post #22
fm2606 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"found them all a bit pants" Can you explain this phrase to me? I've never heard it before and I can't get the meaning from the context. Thanks

I believe it's this one? - "adjective. British slang. Not good; total crap; nonsense; rubbish; bad "The first half of the movie was pants but I stayed until the end and it was actually a great film." " https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pants HN is the pants, man! (am I doing it right? am I cool?)

Better would be - HN is the dogs bollocks, other sites are just bollocks

Re: Mastering Programming (2016)

#42

Post by mrkeen »

_hao wrote: post #29
brtkdotse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what actual publicly available product has he ever produced? oh, i remember - a not very good smalltalk test framework. See also, Bob Martin.

I think Martin has a lot more to answer for as far as the sorry state of software today goes. Watching his discussion with Casey Muratori on GitHub last year was great. Not many people saw it, but boy does he compare poorly to a truly capable and knowledgeable programmer - https://github.com/unclebob/cmuratori-discussion

What harmful info is Martin putting out there?

Re: Mastering Programming (2016)

#43

Post by perihelions »

philk10 wrote: post #41
perihelions wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's this one? - "adjective. British slang. Not good; total crap; nonsense; rubbish; bad "The first half of the movie was pants but I stayed until the end and it was actually a great film." " https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pants HN is the pants, man! (am I doing it right? am I cool?)

Better would be - HN is the dogs bollocks, other sites are just bollocks

No, it's the cat's pyjamas.

Re: Mastering Programming (2016)

#44

Post by mrkeen »

zabzonk wrote: post #18
brtkdotse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what actual publicly available product has he ever produced? oh, i remember - a not very good smalltalk test framework. See also, Bob Martin.

oh, yes. uncle bob. oh god. at one time he tried to establish himself on stackoverflow but was very quickly dumped for knowing nothing.

Weird. A cursory glance reveals that he's 'top 9%' overall.

Re: Mastering Programming (2016)

#45

Post by dharmon »

_hao wrote: post #29
brtkdotse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what actual publicly available product has he ever produced? oh, i remember - a not very good smalltalk test framework. See also, Bob Martin.

I think Martin has a lot more to answer for as far as the sorry state of software today goes. Watching his discussion with Casey Muratori on GitHub last year was great. Not many people saw it, but boy does he compare poorly to a truly capable and knowledgeable programmer - https://github.com/unclebob/cmuratori-discussion

I generally have a negative opinion of Martin, but did we read the same discussion? Martin was very gracious in letting many points slide (points where he was correct!), and was generously willing to end the conversation at a sort-of draw when it was clear that Muratori was not really prepared to discuss things at a detailed level (It was obvious to me from the start that Muratori thought "dynamic polymorphism" just meant deep hierarchies of inheritance, a la early C++, Martin realized this later and I think that was the first inkling that he was wasting his time).

Muratori was even wasting his time arguing against programmer time _in general_ is less valuable than machine time? And doesn't understand that LLVM is an extremely specialized piece of software, from which general software engineering practices should not be extracted?

Re: Mastering Programming (2016)

#46

Post by kjs3 »

zabzonk wrote: post #28
petersellers wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your original post, you dismissed the article because you read previous books of his and thought they were bad. That is literally an ad hominem.

no, it isn't. ad hominem is attacking a person. i was criticising his writings.

Yes, "all a bit pants" really plumbs the depths of intellectual critique.

Re: Mastering Programming (2016)

#47

Post by FrustratedMonky »

wildknocker wrote: post #6
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #2

I think an expert knows this. and For A new, non-expert, these suggestions might be too generic, too high level, broad. They wont grasp the point.

Even if the suggestions are a bit too generic, they might click for someone some time after they've read it. It also helps validate some things that less experienced programmers might be doing but aren't sure are the best things. I for example found that some things I seem to be gravitating towards are mentioned, which will hopefully allow me to focus on them and grasp them better in the future.

I agree.

I might be, being miss-interpreted as dismissing this article.

They are definitely good points, and doesn't hurt to read them.

I think all the points are valid.

Maybe I was just contemplating how experts sometimes 'summarize' their knowledge, condense it, but in the process of trying to be succinct, becomes itself un-fathomable, generic.

Re: Mastering Programming (2016)

#49

Post by _gabe_ »

elteto wrote: post #35
_hao wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Martin has a lot more to answer for as far as the sorry state of software today goes. Watching his discussion with Casey Muratori on GitHub last year was great. Not many people saw it, but boy does he compare poorly to a truly capable and knowledgeable programmer - https://github.com/unclebob/cmuratori-discussion

I started reading this and honestly don’t see the part where he “compares poorly” against Muratori. And disclaimer, I know more about Casey and his work than I know about “Uncle Bob”. If anything, Bob managed to explain himself very well and defend his point of view, which is, “context matters and programmer cycles are more important than CPU cycles in the majority of contexts”. I think this is something we could all…

> “context matters and programmer cycles are more important than CPU cycles in the majority of contexts”. I think this is something we could all agree on, no?

I don’t think people agree on this (I don’t at least). I like the story falsely attributed to Steve Jobs about how saving a user 1 second will save hundreds of years or whatever. From that perspective, programmer cycles are way less important than CPU cycles because every CPU cycle you save has a multiplicative effect depending on how many users you serve. And how true is that today when you have thousands of large business apps depending on one cloud service provider. The compounding effects of saving CPU cycles in every level of the stack has never been higher than it is today.

Re: Mastering Programming (2016)

#50

Post by jdlshore »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #48

I generally don’t meta comment, but a bit surprising to me that the bulk of this discussion has been flagged dead. I think the discussion and criticisms there were valid.

If you have enough karma, you can “vouch” a dead comment back to life by clicking the timestamp.

At the time of these writing, only one comment was dead, and it was rude and content-free. The rest of its tree was arguing about Beck in general rather than the article, so everything’s working as intended IMO.

Post reply on HN