This reminds me of the hostility towards the Tinkers in Vernor Vinge's The Peace War.
Burn the Programmer
201–210 of 254 posts
Re: Burn the Programmer
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
The senior staff at Unseen University in Pratchett's Discworld series are a lot like this.
Well, it depends on if you're talking early series or late series. Early series, the wizards were college academia taken to absurdist violent extremes, to the point of assassinating each other to try and get tenure slots. Most of that got quietly dropped over time to make them more likeable.
...that's an option?
(Ex-academic here.)
Re: Burn the Programmer
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite a lot of times, actually. It helps to work in gamedev, but I think a lot of developers can have interesting and meaningful conversations with outsiders about their work if they focus on the domain, things that they are building and problems they're solving, not the inner workings of languages and frameworks.
What if you write kernels or compilers for a living? Talking about a business domain is cheating :D
If you can't make a race condition in a device driver into an interesting story, you need to work on your story telling :)
And compilers are fascinating - you are, essentially, formalizing the act of translating between languages. Something anybody who speaks more than one language can understand.
You probably can't translate everything you do into a great story, but the basics of your field should be straightforward.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, K&M. Lots of potential, many fun moments, but it's far from rationalist fiction. Still, if you ever need wish fulfillment that the time you spend at work beating down technical debt could instead allow you to fight monsters and cast spells leveraging the mana pool of a giant robot, it's a fun read/watch. From an unofficial (and somewhat grammatically atrocious) English translation of the original novel [0]: > Nor…
I also really loved the episode of "In Another World With My Smartphone" where the character aquires the spell "program" which lets a caster enchant a physical object with a command. The regular wizards use it to, let's say, make a door open when someone says "open" or other minor one-step commands. The protagonist, a modern human stuck in a magical world, uses it differently. He creates sequences with it. He scripts…
I was a little disappointed that a 600+ year-old fairy didn't remember to properly set conditionals, though. :D
Re: Burn the Programmer
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite a lot of times, actually. It helps to work in gamedev, but I think a lot of developers can have interesting and meaningful conversations with outsiders about their work if they focus on the domain, things that they are building and problems they're solving, not the inner workings of languages and frameworks.
What if you write kernels or compilers for a living? Talking about a business domain is cheating :D
I got to answer the question with "I write file system performance benchmarks" once. Got looked at like I said I played with spleens for a living.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#206Considering how many programming abstractions most programmers work above now, I'd say it's more like magic now then ever before. Draw the circle (add the boiler plate code), recite the words (dig up the proper API method), perform the gestures (compile with certain flags) and your spell (desktop app) will work. If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. As a side note, if anyone's interested in l…
> As a side note, if anyone's interested in looking a bit more into "programming as magic" there's a great book series called The Wizardry If you like that kind of thing and you enjoy/don't mind anime, there's also the serie Knight’s & Magic. It is about a programmer being reborn in a world where people wield big "golem" armors. The protagonist then proceed to make his own version, completly disregarding the philosop…
I just watched the whole thing based on this post. 3/5. Not really worth the 5 hours, but it was alright. The premise was neat.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#207Re: Burn the Programmer
#208This whole mystifying programming may be good for the ego but its not real.
Anyone sufficiently interested can learn programming, and even work as a programmer without a degree and the 3-4 years of education and training other professions require.
And programming is not particularly difficult, people learn for more than 16-20 years of their life. Those interested will pick it up.
There is something seriously wrong in the tech community when many are quick and even eager to think of others as stupid. This is not only immature but its disconnected from reality. I think many should spend compulsory time with kids to understand how truly wonderful the human brain is.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#209Considering how many programming abstractions most programmers work above now, I'd say it's more like magic now then ever before. Draw the circle (add the boiler plate code), recite the words (dig up the proper API method), perform the gestures (compile with certain flags) and your spell (desktop app) will work. If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. As a side note, if anyone's interested in l…
Obligatory reference to Vernor Vinge's Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky that explores programmer archeologists or programmer at arms.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it? I've only modified existing configurations, but Postfix doesn't seem bad.
Postfix is quite simple, provided you already know how MTAs work and can google the right terms. Sendmail.cf deserves its reputation.
> Sendmail.cf deserves its reputation.
Hah; I had to look at a sendmail config a while back for a legacy server. It's line noise.