This is an annoying, pretentious article. You don’t need to know all of the intricate internals of a language and its runtime to appreciate its features. Similarly, you don’t need to learn all of the frameworks in the TypeScript ecosystem to be productive in TypeScript. So clearly there’s a disconnect between what the author wishes programming would be and the reality of programming.
Where have all the hackers gone?
131–140 of 351 posts
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#132Another reason is that being a fan of less popular tech is heavily punishing to career and job hunting. Hell, it's quite a challenge to find a job even in React/JavaScript (took me a good month or even a bit more last time, and I'm a senior dev), and it would be a nightmare for languages/ecosystems like Haskell or Rust. I wouldn't even want to find another JS job because I don't want to go through a month of such str…
But presumably there is also more competition for jobs using popular technologies?
Perhaps the more important metric is supply of devs relative to demand. The top paying languages, according to the Stack Overflow's 2022 survey, are generally less popular: Clojure, Erlang, F#, LISP are the top 4. While certainly not an ideal metric (e.g., perhaps salaries are skewed due to more senior devs using these languages), this hints that the demand is certainly there relative to supply as companies are willing to pony up some decent cash for these devs.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s why nerds hate MBA-types. They see little value in understanding and engaging with the qualitative side of being human.
One reason, but to be fair MBA types can have the same lack of empathy. Their interactions can turn into (actually kind one of the things the author complains about) treating people purely as capital and relationships as means to financial end.
You’re absolutely right. There’s understanding how people tick, then there’s feeling it too.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#134> Languages with proper concurrency like JVM, BEAM, or Go don't require Sidekiq or Celery queues This author needs to understand with web/api programming, even using JVM, Go, etc still require Celery/Sidekiq/WakaQ for siloing. You don't want some developer using Go to hog 100% of all webserver CPU doing something concurrently but which should have been done on a background server.
No, you don't require those things. If you're using the proper primitives, they literally can't hog 100% of the server CPU. In fact, the default concurrency primitives in the BEAM/Go do not hog 100% of the CPU, meaning you literally have to go out of your way to fuck it up.
This makes a difference, and means you do not require queues for properly silo'd background tasks.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#135Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common? The author has a list of reasons (VC money, business culture, managers, fear of the unknown). I, personally, have observed this reduction over my career, and I have my own idea of why that might be, my own phrasing of it. Perhaps it gets at the same thing as the author from a different angle. I think the reason, plain and…
I think the hacker culture of the ‘90s to early ‘00s is behind us, and it really saddens me. I’ve yet to find a corner of the current tech / startup landscape that ignites the same excitement I felt over a decade ago. It’s too commercial now.
I think you'll find that to some extent in the manufacture-on-demand scene. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening. Same goes for custom electronics, there's a lot of really interesting hobbyist projects. Biotech is on the edge of getting there. The ML scene is currently absolutely bonkers.
There are plenty of hacker culture areas, they just aren't the same as the 90's and 00's. Neither were the 90's the same as the 80's. In fact, I'd argue the 00's were nothing like the 90's either.
The spaces are there. You'll need to abandon the thing you know. (And for many of us, that's hard, because the thing we know is also feeding us - but that, too, was always true)
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#136Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common? The author has a list of reasons (VC money, business culture, managers, fear of the unknown). I, personally, have observed this reduction over my career, and I have my own idea of why that might be, my own phrasing of it. Perhaps it gets at the same thing as the author from a different angle. I think the reason, plain and…
Also: potential hackers might never really form into hackers because there’s a strong career path and financial incentive to work on big boring software engineering using the same skills That’s actually the exact same story of how I ended up in computer science instead of pure mathematics. I was interested in pure logic and set theory, but I could flex the same muscles learning programming language theory and end up…
The funny thing is most of my college mates who took mathematics or electrical engineering degrees, or some other random similar degree all ended up doing programming. The pay in coding is so much higher that they all end up in it, and half of those degrees ended up being coding anyway :)
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#137Making things easy is the problem. It's been long known in secret societies, that guarding entry through a solvable but hard entry barrier makes it more rewarding for those who do make it through and the ones already inside. In programming, we have tried to make everything easy: JavaScript everywhere. Electron everywhere. Slow code everywhere. No need to think about memory of cpu cycles at all. The result is piles of…
In some ways things are a lot harder. In the early 90s I was able to borrow Turbo C from my brother. He gave me a pointer to video memory and I could use math to draw stuff. I was making stuff in a few minutes.
yes but they enjoy that. there is a reason why notion and things have gotten so popular. people love to pretend they are doing hard shit, when all they are doing is faffing around. react is the textbook definition of faffing around. useHooks. Jesus Christ. What a waste of time.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#138I think the author of this article grossly misunderstood the purpose of his interaction which lead to this article. You aren't architecting a new programming language, man, you're talking to a guy about computers because you're wearing a shirt of a computer thing he liked. He wanted to talk to you because he had a mutual passion he wanted to share, and you openly challenged him in front of other people. Sorry, you we…
You don't know what the other person really wanted or thought - and neither did the author, apparently. The breakdown in communication here is that you, and the author, had certain expectations, assumptions, and unknown information, and you both made conclusions based on all that variable, unknowable, uncommunicated stuff. Rather than assume what's going on in the other person's head, ask them. Assume good faith unti…
My issue isn't what he said, it's how he said it. He could have been more respectful about the other person's opinion about go, but "I suspect he didn't know or think much about [feautures of go]" suggests a very prevalent judgmental attitude towards CS I feel brings the culture of the industry down.
> He instead emphatically talked about how much he loved that "the Go developers knew that all you need is a for loop. Someone brought Scala into my company and I hate the mental shift."
All you need is a for loop? Interesting! Why did they say that? What design decisions informs this approach?
If someone with neither experience in scala or go were to choose one language for this project, why would they use Go or Scala?
If the guy truly has no idea what he's talking about, then it should be evident just by him speaking and you asking questions. If he does, then at best you learn something new or at worse hear a different perspective. Be an active listener and engage with what the other person is saying. You can be critical without being judgmental. It's sort of impossible to have bad faith in this way, because you're taking what the other person is saying seriously instead of writing them off.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#139My take is simply that programming has gotten way bigger. People seem to think that in the “old days”, programmers ate raw potatoes and programmed in assembly because it put hairs on their chest. The reality is, computers were way simpler objects back then. Assembler on the Intel 4004 has like, 30 opcodes or something. The list fits on your phone screen without scrolling. Modern javascript bundlers pull in more code…
I like this take. Good luck being a “hacker” when the webpack config takes 2 days for a pro and a week for a novice. The programming landscape is far more complex.
Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
#140Two answers:
(i) late stage capitalism: who cares about going through a 400 pages spec sheet to try and reverse engineer the ludicrous Chinglish [1] in which all non-mainstream manuals are written today (wanted to declare war on China by myself when parsing through a Xinje PLC manual recently) when you could be fired at any time, a health emergency can bankrupt you, you generally feel more and more powerless, from your daily life to the once-in-a-lifetime-but-happening-every-week events such as economic crises, pandemics, wars, automated labor, x-flation, climate change, and so on and so forth.
(ii) product refinement: we no longer are interested in a few lines of assembly which barely show two lines and a dot moving on the screen [2], we want that feeling, silky smooth user experience which some companies spend billions to provide, but very few individuals can offer by themselves, examples would be something in the tier of Bartosz Ciechanowski [3], scottbez1 [4], or Chris from Clickspring [5], for a more hardware bent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinglish
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong