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

Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 186 posts

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#111

Post by guscost »

nirvana wrote: post #100

I first noticed something like this, though I draw the lines differently, in the 1980s. What's interesting is that there has been a shift over the years to where "programming" has come ot have a strong ideological bias to only one type. The types I noticed then I call Cowboys and Architects. These are just terms I'm using for convenience, not meant as pejoratives. Cowboys are now more common: Some programmers write a…

Interestingly, you sound like a "regular" conservative complaining about the false right/left dichotomy in the mainstream urban press. I think Steve even suggested that both of his characterizations might seem "liberal" from certain perspectives.

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#112

Post by natrius »

justanotheratom wrote: post #93
brown9-2 wrote: post #47

Off-topic but does Google Plus offer any way to view a post nearly full-screen, without all the extra margin and white space taking up 2/3rds of the screen? A bit annoying that the post text only takes up about 33% of my available screen real estate, even on the "view single post" URL: http://cl.ly/image/1p1B2o3D262g

I am a Google Plus hold-out and it is sad to see that I am required to signup for Plus to read Yegge's blogs now.

Did you click the link? I can read it in both an incognito window and logged in to a Google account without Google+.

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#113

Post by stock_toaster »

I found it thought provoking, but I am not sure I agree with the classifications he arrived at. People sure do love putting names on things and classifying things into buckets!

I did find it interesting that he considers himself a liberal (both in software and politics), then then goes on to create a "type system" categorization for programmers (and programming languages) to be placed into.

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#116

Post by dasil003 »

kstenerud wrote: post #71

What "politics" I adopt depends mostly on what I'm building. If it's a library that someone else will use, I try to play as conservatively as possible, and I fully expect that despite my best efforts those developers will uncover lots of bugs regardless. If it's a mission critical application, I'll also be conservative. The more pain there is in fixing things later, the more careful I'll be up front. When I'm writing…

This is essentially what I commented on G+ and what I came here to say.

A programmer who does not understand the tradeoffs of liberalism vs conservatism as Yegge defines them is not a good engineer. At best they might be talented at doing things a very specific way, sort of like a designer whose stuff all looks the same and is often inappropriate for the job at hand. Such a person is more an artist than a designer, and I'd make the same distinction for someone who writes log-processing code in Haskell or codes software for a spaceship in Ruby.

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#117

Post by flatline3 »

cletus wrote: post #28

As much as some commenters are (weirdly?) railing against this classification scheme I think the underlying idea that software conservatism is about risk aversion is essentially accurate. Perhaps another way of framing this is to ask the question: are you optimizing for the best case or the worst case? This ultimately is a form of risk management. And I'm not talking in the algorithmic sense, meaning complexity expre…

Yegge took a massive shit on technical discourse, and if not countered, the ramifications thereof could be felt for years. His influence is disproportional to his value, and I am extremely disappointed to see anyone here taking his emotional arguments seriously.

Unless firmly censured, I expect to see Yegge's ridiculous viral meme of "liberal vs. conservative" spread and repeated by inexperienced developers indefinitely.

If I had any respect for Yegge, I entirely lost it here. The question of how to write software should be founded in careful consideration of specific problem domains, experience and research, and studied approaches. It should not be founded in some gross politicized and emotional argument.

Yegge is not just wrong, his reframing of engineering decision making is dangerous, and his ridiculous and viral engineering-as-politics meme makes people dumber for having simply read it. I'm disgusted with it, as well as any debate that seriously approaches his irrational appeal to emotion.

Yegge should be ashamed.

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#118

Post by technomancy »

richhickey wrote: post #86
dsantiago wrote: post #29

I'm trying to think of what anti-macros Clojure talk by a "key presenter" he might be referring to. I'm only familiar with the talks from Clojure/conj, so the only one that I can think of is Christophe Grand's (not= DSLs macros) talk from 2010[1]. If so, I think his summary mischaracterizes the content of that talk, but it could be another talk he's thinking of. [1] http://blip.tv/clojure/christophe-grand-not-dsl-mac…

I think Christophe's is the talk, and Yegge seriously misunderstood it, if he even bothered to watch it. Christophe's point was that basing the underpinnings of a DSL on macros was frequently a mistake, vs a data + functions approach that "leads to greater dynamicity". It is inarguable that macros are less flexible than functions (e.g. they can't be applied) and less composable. Christophe's argument wasn't against m…

> If Yegge doesn't like Clojure, fine. But to rationalize like this is weak.

A bit of historical context from the last time this came up:

http://groups.google.com/group/seajure/browse_thread/thread/...

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#119

Post by kator »

sramsay wrote: post #74
kator wrote: post #48

I know I will regret this but here is a little survey I whipped up quickly. It's static so results are local to your browser.. Enjoy: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/704864/software-politics.html

Very surprised to see what a centrist I am; my unscientific number is -5). I would have pegged myself as much more liberal, but when it comes to specific points having to do with design and deployment, I'm more conservative than I would have thought.

I was a bit surprised at my result since I've done large systems and have been developing for 30 years. I think I lean toward more of the "get it done" camp unless it's a super high-production (i.e. money gets lost when down) system then I might tend further toward the center. :)

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#120

Post by technomancy »

vorg wrote: post #72
naitbit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally for longer page browsing I pivot my screen vertically, zoom and scroll to make content fit my screen. It may not be fastest way but gets job done. It works better on Google plus then on some other pages(were some toolbars obfuscates content on zoomed page, or which get to wide for screen). On non pivoted screen I usually have browser only on left halve on the screen and do it same way. There may be some pl…

You're lucky you can view any of it. In China nothing from gplus arrives.

That's called a blessing in disguise.
Post reply on HN