It takes a PhD to develop that
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It takes a PhD to develop that
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Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#2This seems like giving up. The article is right about the problems but seems temperamentally opposed to actually fixing them. Number of people under you is a terrible metric in many ways, but it is at least objective (ish) and hard to fake; so is years of experience. If you take the position that programming skill requires years of particular kinds of learning and there is no way to assess whether someone with x years on their CV has actually done y years of that kind of learning... well, maybe that's true, but what's the actionable takeaway from that?
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#3Nope!
It's just that in corporate world, developers rarely do what they think is relevant for them.
The people who did Windows terminal probably cared a lot about COM or WinAPI or maybe CS, but I think it's fair to imagine how they were not fans of text-oriented interfaces. It just did not occur that they should be extracting last bit of performance here. People can type just that fast, after all.
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#4Nope! It's just that in corporate world, developers rarely do what they think is relevant for them. The people who did Windows terminal probably cared a lot about COM or WinAPI or maybe CS, but I think it's fair to imagine how they were not fans of text-oriented interfaces. It just did not occur that they should be extracting last bit of performance here. People can type just that fast, after all.
Windows terminal is a shit show. The dev blogs posts are all about useless features such as image background while fundamentals like unicode input are still broken.
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#5This seems like giving up. The article is right about the problems but seems temperamentally opposed to actually fixing them. Number of people under you is a terrible metric in many ways, but it is at least objective (ish) and hard to fake; so is years of experience. If you take the position that programming skill requires years of particular kinds of learning and there is no way to assess whether someone with x year…
I don't disagree. That said, the first step in solving a problem is to understand that there is one and what are its root causes.
EDIT: I think sometimes to goal of some prose is to be thought provoking, i.e. to allow us to find somebody else who perhaps will find a better solution if only they had been stimulated enough to care about a problem
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#6Nope! It's just that in corporate world, developers rarely do what they think is relevant for them. The people who did Windows terminal probably cared a lot about COM or WinAPI or maybe CS, but I think it's fair to imagine how they were not fans of text-oriented interfaces. It just did not occur that they should be extracting last bit of performance here. People can type just that fast, after all.
Yeah, that’s another problem, the software industry as a whole is horrendously bad at getting requirements right.
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#7A few hours later another programmer came up with the prototype of a much faster terminal renderer, proving that for an experienced programmer a terminal renderer is a fun weekend project and far away from being a multiyear long research undertaking.
I have no idea if this is the case here, and I suspect it might not be, but pretty much every time I've seen a developer complain that something is slow and then 'prove' that it can be faster by making a proof-of-concept the only reason theirs is faster is because it doesn't implement the important-but-slow bits and it ignores most of the edge cases. You shouldn't automatically assume something is actually bad just because someone shows a better proof-of-concept 'alternative'. They may have just ignored half the stuff it needs to do.
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#8This reflects a lot of what goes on in Academia as well.
Also, if you think you can counter a "that's not possible" with a working proof of said thing working, think again, most people don't like to be shown they're wrong, particularly tenured professors. That's one of the fastest ways to sabotage your own developing career.
"Yes men" climb the ladder much easier, but then work doesn't do itself so that's the catch. Cue exploitation of interns and other newcomers and you almost have the whole picture on how things get actually done. Hence why "science advances one funeral at a time". Once someone reaches its own Peter level [1], it stops being a productive force and becomes a plug that jams everything behind it.
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#9> A few hours later another programmer came up with the prototype of a much faster terminal renderer, proving that for an experienced programmer a terminal renderer is a fun weekend project and far away from being a multiyear long research undertaking.
I read through the Github issue and can't find the prototype mentioned here. Can anyone link the PR/code if they know it please?
Re: It takes a PhD to develop that
#10Counter argument: If the experienced programmers stay where they are, software development will forever remain craftsmanship. A single developer can only tutor so many juniors.
In fact, I think that teaching and encouraging to learn is the most important thing in SE. And that has to begin with leadership figures that don't believe their own knowledge gets obsolete after one year just because the latest framework got released.
SE should not be an art form. It should be founded in solid science and abstraction should allow us to keep our knowledge applicable. You're not a bad engineer because you never touched the latest hypetech or programming language. You are a bad engineer if you only consider yourself a "frontend developer with react on chrome".
All IMO, of course.