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The silent majority in software

vadimkravcenko.com

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Re: The silent majority in software

#361

Post by kkfx »

eh2beifhe wrote: post #228
kkfx wrote: post #74

Well... Silent majority also means the mass of people who do not contribute to the society except for they use as meat-based weapons in politics, religion... Yes they have a value, for some it's the same value of a flock of cows: munging meat, milk etc. For some a hope or absence thereof for the humanity. IN history unfortunately the former tend to win all the time...

So how does this apply to software then? Why are silent people in the software industry "meat based weapons" and what for?

"software" does not means only developers, PMs and code monkeys, but also "moderators" for GAFAM and their Chinese/Russian counterparts, who normally happen to be very stressed and little paid censors, i.e. meat-based weapons against their own co-Citizens. But also those who act a bit like code monkeys to develop common crapware so many use, mostly in web and business crapware etc. They all contribute to DESTROY IT and civilization together.

I just only suggest a thought: did you noticed how many now can't use pen&papers properly for instance to write something a bit more long and complex than a quick few words note? Well, there is nothing wrong in that IF they know to do the same with some other mean... The issue is that they do not equally know how to do on a computer. Actually we have even lawyers unable to format a decent letter without a template on a computer or by pen&paper. I call them skilled illiterate... And that's not only about a letter, for diagrams, simple drawing it's the same. Most can't even IMAGING doing something like humans have done on paper 10+ years ago with a software, they can't imaging having in a unique documents some text, formulas, a plot, an email etc. They are so trained that you need a different program for anything (because that's good for business) that they feel the WOW effect just seeing a modern limited and limiting "notebook UI". Some colleagues (sysadmins and some devs) have a similar effects seeing me with Emacs, many at first demo act like children in front of something new that seem magic to their eyes. That's is.

Re: The silent majority in software

#362

Post by ttpphd »

noirbot wrote: post #209
trasz wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nixon’s internal politics isn’t “basic history” anywhere except US.

Sure, but if your premise for the article is "This thing in my field is a lot like Nixon's politics", I'd expect you to not get Nixon's politics wrong, specifically because a lot of people may not know it enough to tell if your comparison is correct.

And to those who do know, it immediately discredits you in front of them.

Re: The silent majority in software

#364

Post by dhcjdiwhc »

Jensson wrote: post #327
orangepurple wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Downvoting disagreeable people will eventually completely silence them with that logic. One has to be generally agreeable to maintain positive karma. Not sure if the side effect is worth it. There are a lot of amusing assholes out there with unpopular opinions. Opinions that are highly relevant to the topic at hand can be polarizing, but these will likely result in the poster having negative karma long term. p…

That isn't true, I am very disagreeable and argumentative and post before I think, and still maintain positive karma without any issues. Edit: It works since to downvote you need 500 karma, but everyone can upvote, so getting many upvotes is a lot easier than getting many downvotes.

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Re: The silent majority in software

#365

Post by JohnFen »

gernb wrote: post #80
veltas wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say that in my own experience, if you go against the zeitgeist on HN you can often get by as long as you're sensitive/respectful and intelligent on the issue. There are people who downvote things they disagree with, but I think most people on here downvote people who sound unconstructive or argumentative. And at the end of the day, if you're respectful etc, who cares about being downvoted or having people argu…

you're supposed to downvote things you disagree with on HN. Here's Dang pointing to PG saying that downvoting for disagreeing is what you're supposed to do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

I sometimes upvote replies to my own comments that I disagree with, because I think they make a good or interesting point (even if I disagree). Am I doing it wrong?

Re: The silent majority in software

#366

Post by llllIIIIllll »

wnolens wrote: post #352
llllIIIIllll wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After years and years in C# I spent half a year writing Typescript full time. IMO it's not that Typescript is limited at all, it's just that the type system is different, more complex and also more flexible - there are typically more ways to define types compared to Java/C#, so a lot more decision points trying to write something elegant, or even just idiomatic/understandable, so IMO the learning curve is steep. And…

Interesting, yeah I had one or two good moments after spending a few hours wrangling my interfaces. But the frustration left a worse impression than did the benefits. Perhaps if I was being paid to do it and had mentors around to ask for help. But I couldn't find any good advice online.

I had a pretty terrible experience at that job - no engineering manager, never had any code reviewed, hardly any collaboration with other team members so I was basically stabbing away in the dark trying to get my shit together in TS.

It took me far longer than a few hours to feel comfortable, probably more like over a month of coding to get to the point where I mostly understood how to express what I wanted with the type system, and had stopped doing C# things in TS and adhering to style guidelines - functional modules, types instead of classes, injecting dependencies etc. And another month or two? to really figure out how everyone has been (ab)using the type system to do more complex stuff.

Re: The silent majority in software

#368

Post by giancarlostoro »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #360
giancarlostoro wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the one! Thank you! I didn't realize it was from one of the founders of the language, which actually makes a LOT of sense. I wonder what tech he saw back then that made him think of it, I can only come up with more modern examples.

He was writing in 2008, so probably some Java thing http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2008-January/03...

I saw the quote attributed to a book they wrote back in the late 90s as well, but I'm not sure how accurate the attribution is... If it is accurate, I'm genuinely curious what project in the 90s was remotely comparable. The answer could be as simple as whatever they were using prior to creating Erlang.

Re: The silent majority in software

#369

Post by Micheal1 »

oaiey wrote: post #158
jongjong wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so frustrating to find a nice job advert, then you read through the (very specific) list of requirements and you're thinking to yourself "JavaScript: Check, Node.js: Check, Postgres: Check, Docker: Check, REST: Check, WebSockets: Check, Redis: Check, RabbitMQ: Check, Distributed systems: Check, nginx: Check, Kubernetes: Check, GraphQL: DAMN IT! This was almost a match..."

You hire smart people not perfect matches.

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Re: The silent majority in software

#370

Post by danielvaughn »

jollybean wrote: post #222
danielvaughn wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who really appreciates strong typing, I will die on this hill - I hate Typescript. Introducing a transpiled typing system on top of a dynamically typed language is a recipe for all sorts of insane complexity, which is what I experience whenever I try to use TS. If you consider all the time and effort it took to introduce types for every NPM project out there, all the development of the language itself, the…

I consider JS an anti-pattern and won't allow more then 50 lines to be anywhere near me without TypeScript. The issues raised are innumerable. TS is really flexible and you can do some crazy gymnastics with it - I don't favour that. Just keep it very simple and don't go crazy with the generics. I've never had a problem at all, I've never had to dig into what was transpiled.

Someone else in the thread mentioned how The Good Parts™ idea applies to TS just as much as JS, and I think that's what kinda frustrates me about it. If they'd just kept the damn thing simple, I don't think I'd have a problem with it.
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