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Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

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Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#101

Post by raffael_de »

rdevilla wrote: post #16

I suspect this is why formal languages exist; as a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bay, and a system for turning bullshit into parse errors. We are undoing much of this progress by now insisting everything be expressed in natural language for a machine to translate on our behalf, like a tour guide. The natives will continue to speak amongst themselves in their mother tongue.

> formal languages exist; as [...] a system for turning bullshit into parse errors

that's a very neat way to put it!

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#103

Post by ryandv »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #97
rdevilla wrote: post #16

I suspect this is why formal languages exist; as a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bay, and a system for turning bullshit into parse errors. We are undoing much of this progress by now insisting everything be expressed in natural language for a machine to translate on our behalf, like a tour guide. The natives will continue to speak amongst themselves in their mother tongue.

That's not quite accurate. Formal languages (which have an old pedigree) can be useful for clarification and inference, but they can also obfuscate the truth, and what's more, subvert it. Every logical formalism necessarily presupposes some metaphysics, and if the metaphysics is bad, or you fail to recognize the effective bounds of that formalism, you can fall into mechanically generated bullshit. Modern predicate lo…

[dead]

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#105

Post by arethuza »

Barbing wrote: post #96
duped wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is not to be read as a necessarily "bad" thing I (and many others) read it as "dishonesty"

Is there a historical example or does anyone have an anecdote of some crunch time where the CEO blowing hot air was the best thing for morale? Compared to what I might think a lot of us would prefer in many cases, which might be an honest assessment & making us part of the journey to overcome whatever adversity.

"an honest assessment & making us part of the journey to overcome whatever adversity"

I suspect that most people just aren't wired up that way - we have a natural tendency to want to follow leaders and what we seem to want most from leaders is certainty and confidence. Does it matter what leaders are certain and confident about - not really.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#106

Post by jancsika »

rdevilla wrote: post #16

I suspect this is why formal languages exist; as a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bay, and a system for turning bullshit into parse errors. We are undoing much of this progress by now insisting everything be expressed in natural language for a machine to translate on our behalf, like a tour guide. The natives will continue to speak amongst themselves in their mother tongue.

> a system for turning bullshit into parse errors

Because when I go to view an old website from the 90s that's missing a closing tag for something, I don't want the content-- I want a big red XML parse error with a gigantic horizontal scrollbar.

The history of programmers blithely attempting to add new parsing errors to existing problems instead of obviating them is long and storied. Your sentence would look right at home as part of the BS generated for the test subjects from the article.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#107

Post by jghn »

domga wrote: post #66
antonymoose wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wildly controversial! I look at OOP Patterns as standards and practices. The same way we have building codes for staircases the framing of walls and electrical installations to prevent injury or collapse or fire. Sure, you can dodge a lot of design pattern paradigms and still make a working application that makes money. You can also invent your own system when building your house and maybe nothing bad will happen. Th…

A decent chunk of OOP patterns was due to lack of language features, notably passing and returning functions

It's both.

The *concept* of patterns makes sense. A shared language that developers can use when building things.

The *reality* of patterns has been much less useful. The original ones were indeed a reaction to warts in the popular languages of their era. And as we tend to do in our industry, these have been cargo culted along the way and for some reason I still see people talking about them as first class citizens 30 years later.

People don't seem to realize that patterns should be and are fluid, and as our industry evolves these patterns are evolving as well. A major difference between software engineering and the analogous fields people use when talking about patterns is those industries are much older and move less quickly

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#108

Post by delecti »

butILoveLife wrote: post #92
DrewADesign wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it’s not clickbait. It accurately reflects the article content, and seemingly, the discussed study’s results.

The Karl Popper in me says: Its barely useful science because its not falsifiable. Its like a horoscope, it applies to everyone. Its closer to a tautology "Its raining or its not" than a contradiction "Its raining and its not". The closer to contradiction limits the possible realities, which makes it better science. Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.

How is it not falsifiable? They found a correlation between susceptibility to bullshit and the result of a previously established cognitive tests.

> Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.

That's a terrible example of your point. As long as you can define a metric for "worse at their jobs" (it'll vary a ton based on which job we're talking about, but it still sounds like something you could assign a metric to) then you have a really clear and testable hypothesis.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#109

Post by jghn »

delecti wrote: post #28
alcasa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe controversial, but I believe a lot of OOP/Clean Code patterns are the software equivalent of corporate BS.

I worked with a junior dev who suddenly got really excited about Clean Code. Every example he brought up left me feeling that there was a kernel of good advice, but the book wanted you to take it to such an extreme that it would result in shitty code.

> there was a kernel of good advice, but the book wanted you to take it to such an extreme that it would result in shitty code

I see you're familiar with Uncle Bob's handiwork

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#110

Post by exceptione »

alcasa wrote: post #21
rdevilla wrote: post #16

I suspect this is why formal languages exist; as a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bay, and a system for turning bullshit into parse errors. We are undoing much of this progress by now insisting everything be expressed in natural language for a machine to translate on our behalf, like a tour guide. The natives will continue to speak amongst themselves in their mother tongue.

Maybe controversial, but I believe a lot of OOP/Clean Code patterns are the software equivalent of corporate BS.

I think you can safely omit 'maybe'. OOP is harder and requires more design experience to achieve good results than functional programming. I welcome you to look at OOP code from people who don't get the patterns.

OOP can be wonderful, but the people who aren't able to step up a level in conceptual abstraction should really not touch it. Remember, for many years languages like Java didn't have any concept of lambda's and higher order functions, so design patterns were essential for elegant solutions. As they say, a design pattern is a symptom of the language being not expressive enough. In other words, many design patterns in OOP languages express the same thing as first-class language features in the functional paradigm would do, Visitor vs fold for instance.

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