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The self-hating web developer

joequery.me

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Re: The self-hating web developer

#191

Post by ihsw »

Honestly I think the author wouldn't have such a crushing sense of inferiority if providing for his family wasn't an issue.

I'm very serious about this -- few people can handle the Sword of Damocles[1] hanging above their hands, those impossibly high stakes, that not only are they intimidated but they're paralyzed.

It's a deer in the headlights moment, except instead of being in an instant it's experienced over the course of days/months/years.

Morbid fear of failure can be crippling, even if you're more than capable of completing the task, and failing so consistently -- in the case of the author -- can actually have a damaging effect on your capacity to do such work. You regress.

How does one handle such situations?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles

Re: The self-hating web developer

#192

Post by dang »

pekk wrote: post #170
ectoplasm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to say something like your comment is just 1st order making people feel bad about 0th order making people feel bad, but then I'd be 2nd order making you feel bad about 1st order making people feel bad about 0th order making people feel bad, so then I just thought about how I felt and it was bad. What a mess. Good points about the importance of choosing a good peer group, I totally agree. It's really hard whe…

You think you're cute, but you're missing the point.

Please don't post unsubstantive swipes at other users. If someone misses the point, explain the point, or simply don't comment.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#193

Post by facetube »

noir_lord wrote: post #134
facetube wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, PHP 4.x was completely awful for large and/or OOP codebases due to the totally insane copy-by-default semantics, the need to use &= perfectly at every call site that returned an instance of a class, and a handful of reference-counting bugs that caused interpreter crashes and still weren't fixed when 5.x matured. It's definitely gotten better; I feel like a lot of people who swore off PHP forever are remembering…

> I feel like a lot of people who swore off PHP forever are remembering version four. I think that's a valid point however I'm not sure if that is better or worse when they are attacking something.

Oh, almost certainly worse, unless Rasmus Lerdorf is going on another mailing list tirade and flaming them directly.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#194

Post by patio11 »

Roritharr wrote: post #88
patio11 wrote: post #20

There are few things in life more important than choosing one's peer group well. The Internet gives you many more options than we had available prior to the existence of it. Choose wisely and re-evaluate that choice periodically to see whether your peer group continues to represent your goals and values. Why? Your peer group literally gets arbitrary code execution on your brain. (It's a flaw in MonkeyBrainOS 1.01 whi…

May I quote your first two paragraphs? I have a few people starting out as programmers who really need that kind of language to get that point to them.

In general, please feel free to quote a reasonable amount of anything I write.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#195

Post by solotronics »

liviu- wrote: post #57
vorador wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I have a hard time believing that the misanthropic commenters on r/programming are major opensource contributors. The most prolific programmers simply don't have time to waste on comment threads.

"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F★CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f★ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" - Linus Torvalds, principal author of the Linux kernel

This is what the people of Earth call a 'joke'.

Perhaps the best part of some jokes is that half of the monkey people take these exaggerated fictions seriously and become quite upset upon processing them. This is in itself also a joke.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#196

Post by atlih »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #158
atlih wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically anything that has to do with non-web and non-mobile apps. The app for your nearest ATM machine for example.

Your definition is completely worthless, then. Someone writing Java EE apps is then a "low-level programmer", which is totally wrong. In fact, ATMs these days more often than not have full operating systems like Windows CE with the software being a Java app that communicates over some standardized XML-based middleware to access ATM system and transaction mechanisms.

Not much left for low-level programmers to do then :)

Re: The self-hating web developer

#197

Post by EugeneOZ »

thomasahle wrote: post #63
spion wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its a double-edged sword. On one hand, it does have the disastrous effects described in the article. On the other, those kind of comments from some FP programmers did turn my attention to FP languages. Turns out, there is this amazing group of people that are trying to build an entire ecosystem that stands on solid mathematical foundations. That was really exciting stuff for me. For years I've been watching o…

Haskell us perfectly fine to start with. It's just Haskell + zsh + git + archlinux + vim + cool-tech aren't things you should learn all at once. Heck, 12 years in, and I'm still lot fluent in all of those. We can still tell people about cool stuff, just encourage them to take one step at a time, in their own time.

Advice to start learning programming from Haskell or Lisp or C++ is arrogance.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#198

Post by EugeneOZ »

imakesnowflakes wrote: post #71
noir_lord wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hatred of PHP amongst a certain type is hilarious, they automatically assume that if you chose PHP (or worse program in it because it was what you inherited as well) you are a "lesser programmer". I choose to use PHP despite been capable of using most any language I wanted, over the years I've used and forgotten many languages and for the requirements I have PHP was a good fit. Also modern PHP really isn't like o…

> if you chose PHP (or worse program in it because it was what you inherited as well) you are a "lesser programmer". If you choose php, I will assume that you. 1. Either is not aware of that php has a million gotchas that you need to avoid at every step. Take a look at the ever growing (!) list at /r/lolphp. 2. You don't see the significance of the aforementioned gotchas. For eg, you can show things like php's regist…

Calm down about "gotchas", please, it's already annoying . Every language has gotchas and trade offs. Modern PHP is really much superior than even early versions of PHP 5, not even talking about PHP 4. You can write very clean code in PHP and very smelly in C - it's all up to you.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#199

Post by EugeneOZ »

pmichaud wrote: post #6

Yeah, modern web development is actually really fucking hard mainly because you have to know so many different things. To build an application from scratch, and do it well, you have to have deep knowledge of, let's see... * At least one server side language * Probably a server side framework * HTML * CSS * Maybe a preprocessor language like SASS or CoffeeScript * SQL * HTTP * Probably a SCM like Git * At least one se…

I'm not "controllers" programmer, but I think they also need to know few acronyms and tools in addition to C language.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#200

Post by arpa »

justwannasing wrote: post #190
PopeOfNope wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your favorite web language, then?

We don't use a "web language" unless you include our use of javascript. We make custom sites using C cause we can and it does everything any other language does. We just might switch to Go cause it already contains the libraries we wrote for C years ago but Go makes it more universal to those outside our company.

Well... Why not assembly for custom sites? (C is a joke, etc)
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