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How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

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Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#331

Post by tonyedgecombe »

jrowen wrote: post #72

Something I sometimes think about in this vein: how many lines of code, written by how many people, in how many different times and places, are traversed on your computer every second? It's kind of mind-blowing to me, and I can't think of anything else that works like that. It would be like if, when building a new house, you built it around an existing house, and continued to add layer after layer, and generations la…

I recently read that the typical car now runs about 30 million lines of code. That is just astounding to me (and slightly concerning).

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#332

Post by StavrosK »

chris11 wrote: post #211
stavros wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I was between jobs for a while and it was the best time I've had in ages. I could (and would) do random projects that struck my fancy all the time, go out, see friends, write, design things... It was much more productive than a job, and I was constantly doing things with the parts of technology that don't suck.

> Seriously, I was between jobs for a while and it was the best time I've had in ages. I guess that depends on your financial situation. When I've been between jobs it has always stressed me out. I haven't been in a situation where I was worried about making rent or buying food, but I was worried about finding a new job.

That's true, I live in a country where you can live luxuriously on $2k/mo.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#333

Post by philosopher1234 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #170
philosopher1234 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. This is such a small issue who honestly cares if it gets fixed? I guarantee you this is not the most important thing anyone involved could be working on. Too many perfectionists on this website.

"We were running into this issue where we were getting a 504 Gateway Timeout on the update balance call so I eventually found the Slack room for that team and asked about it. They ignored me for a couple weeks,...." Someone could have documented this and/or simply answered a damn question instead of wasting weeks of opportunity cost. Too many dicks and idiots on that website, it seems. "who honestly cares if it gets…

Put yourself in the shoes of the team who was asked to fix this. They probably have a dozen feature requests, two dozen support tickets, and now this guy wants this bug fixed because it does t follow a standard and he had a hard time understanding it. Yes, that is a real issue, and in the ideal world it would be fixed along with every other issue on the list, but in the real world it is unlikely to ever be important enough to deprioritize the other important issues I imagine this team faces. At the end of the day, some bugs are just better to live with.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#334

Post by Grustaf »

dwaltrip wrote: post #325
Grustaf wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there are people with higher callings, geniuses like Einstein or Newton. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We are talking about moderately intelligent people who will never contribute anything meaningful to humanity. For them work is not an excuse not to have friends or do “frivolous” things. Those frivolous things are what life are made of, so you better have a damn good reason if you avoid them. Be…

> We are talking about moderately intelligent people who will never contribute anything meaningful to humanity. I have to disagree here. The bulk of humanity consists of minor contributions made by people few will ever remember.

Yes and the bulk of humanity manage to both make this minute contribution, and have a family and some friends.

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#335

Post by Vhano »

danwills wrote: post #329

This (awesome and inspiring) article doesn't really go into the philosophy much, but one thing I love in this direction is the way that programming lets us work directly with (abstract) computation - literally any rule-following system that can be described, can be explored. Universal computation is still the max known complexity of any rule-following process, and it's also a low-bar, very easily attained: x86, RISC,…

I find the theory of computation spiritual/awe-inspiring but I'm doubtful of how much of our software workers in our time are in touch with that (and not entirely at a high abstraction distance)

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#337

Post by Vhano »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #205
3princip wrote: post #65

I've found being too attached to code is a recipe for frustration in the workplace. You code something elegant, simple, dare I say beautiful and inevitably it will be butchered by new product requirements, business needs, that quick hack to satisfy a client or more generally uncaring colleagues who are looking to get their job done as quickly as possible. Perhaps romantic aspects could only be achieved when there are…

> It's hard to be romantic in corporate environments. I agree it's hard, but it's not impossible. One thing that heightens the experience for me is to: Listen to movie scores while you program. I first started this to help drown out other noises so I could concentrate. But, I soon realized that there's a lot of drama in the sound: there are highs and lows, chaos and order, fumbles and precision, brief pauses, slow ti…

I understand that. But it's interesting how this experience can be spiritual to some and others may be "purists" who find explicitly avoid extra toppings (listening to music during the task) just to be closer to the task (and thus intaking it in full, they could argue)

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#338

Post by Vhano »

I had this feeling recently! It was close to the deadline and I was burning the midnight oil, just feeling like Neo, jumping through the ifs, whizzing around them loops, dodging them future bugs (oops, almost wrote a do-while), and transporting through the methods. But yea it was awesome. Wrote this cool logging tool for the database guys. It prints the events with timestamp AND in colour(!) to indicate priority. Planning to add features like font weight to indicate audience (QA get light weight, Dev gets italics etc)

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#339

Post by Vhano »

3princip wrote: post #65

I've found being too attached to code is a recipe for frustration in the workplace. You code something elegant, simple, dare I say beautiful and inevitably it will be butchered by new product requirements, business needs, that quick hack to satisfy a client or more generally uncaring colleagues who are looking to get their job done as quickly as possible. Perhaps romantic aspects could only be achieved when there are…

haha yea, I try to sync my clothes to a RGB value that represents that day's mood. Sometimes I just type `cmatrix` and just sit back for a minute thinking about the problem I'm solving (should I use another class or inherit?)

Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)

#340

Post by dgellow »

logbiscuitswave wrote: post #248
picks_at_nits wrote: post #33

I am deeply, deeply romantic about programming. I consider it an act of self-actualization. But answering the question literally, I am not representative of everyone in the industry, and that's a good thing. It's easy to feel romantic about your vocation when you have a number of reasonable options for achieving modest financial security, and you thus had the privilege of choosing the one that most closely matched yo…

I once had someone vehemently complain to me about certain style rules in place in a code base saying, “only machines will ever read it, who cares how it looks as long as it works?” As someone who’s deeply passionate about software development it certainly made me look at this person in a different light.

It might be a lack of experience. I've seen people reacting like this when they are still very new to programming and feel pressured by the need to learn/adapt to stricter rules. After some time once they become more comfortable they pay more attention to the way something is written.
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