Everyone says we should write essays because it will get us noticed, make us more employable, and sharpen our writing skills. But few of us have anything important to say. So we get this glut of self important "considered harmful" essays. And we're all guilty.
“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
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Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#42Everyone says we should write essays because it will get us noticed, make us more employable, and sharpen our writing skills. But few of us have anything important to say. So we get this glut of self important "considered harmful" essays. And we're all guilty.
> Everyone says we should write essays because it will get us noticed, make us more employable, and sharpen our writing skills. But few of us have anything important to say.
The advice needs to be updated slightly, then, to clarify the apparent confusion: you should, if you can, write essays for all those reasons, but step one of writing an essay for those purposes is find something meaningful to say.
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#43The thing that always bothered me about "Considered harmful" titles is that, when you title your own article that, you're just pompously referring to yourself in the third person. The reason they are in the passive voice is that the original "considered harmful" essay was a letter to the editor, and therefore was titled not by the author, but by the editor[1]. Therefore, to expand out the subject of the sentence, the…
> The reason they are in the passive voice is that the original "considered harmful" essay was
...written by a pompous prick (cf. with classy Alan Kay).
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#44The grammatical construction "Blah Blah Considered Harmful" has always bugged me...it doesn't seem proper. Shouldn't it be something like "Blah Blah Should Be Considered Harmful"?
"By the author of this piece" is implied.
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#45So, is this essay also considered harmful by self-reference?
Did you really not see the part of the article at the very beginning addressing this?
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#46No. I'm getting pretty tired of the notion that the only valuable discourse is pleasant, up-beat, and optimistic. This notion attempts to stifle entire swaths of the emotional spectrum and has at it's heart censorship based on a mainstream aversion to anything that smacks of confrontation or conflict. Up with opinionated, confrontational speech.
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the "very-opinionated" point, I'm particularly fond of Alan Kay's quote: > I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.
I've always found that quote to be particularly douchey. Then again, I do think that Dijkstra's contributions to CS were more important than Kay's, too, but I suspect that I might not be in the majority there...
Wikipedia's article on Dijkstra says:
"He was the first to make the claim that programming is so inherently complex that (...)"
Meanwhile Alan Kay had 12 year old kids making computer games (videos on Web Archive).
Dijkstra contributed algorithms. In that sense he contributed as a mathematician. That doesn't diminish what he did. But it does not compare with what Alan Kay did for the sum of these two parts: computers, and people.
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#48It's funny that I was thinking today about writing an article with this exact same title. "Considered harmful" articles are just one person's opinion, most of the time.
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#49Indeed. I'm over these as well as any of the, "Why I quit X technology" or similarly titled essays. Oh and the "Open letter to Big Corp". You're not that important. I don't really care why you quit using X. I don't need validation from some blog about what technology to use or not use. I can evaluate X technology on my own, thank you.
The information from those articles isn't the problem. Just the writing style. They often want to tell you "We're switching from X to Y, because our use-cases aren't that of X (anymore)" But they write it like "We're switching from X to Y and you should too, because X is really bad for everyone!" If you ignore the holier-than-you writing style, and try to read these articles like the first example, they have some use…
This might be the flip side of a certain project presentation style.
How often do you see:
"If you have use case X, SoftGood will help you solve problem Y without triggering problem Z. If you have use case K, SoftGood may not be the best fit for you."
vs
"You should use SoftPanacea -- it's design-driven, big-scale, cloud-fronked, makes your life easier, and is awesome!"
Re: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
#50No. I'm getting pretty tired of the notion that the only valuable discourse is pleasant, up-beat, and optimistic. This notion attempts to stifle entire swaths of the emotional spectrum and has at it's heart censorship based on a mainstream aversion to anything that smacks of confrontation or conflict. Up with opinionated, confrontational speech.
I disagree. If you look at what happens to the brain when it gets angry, nuance is lost in favor of over-simplified black-and-white thinking. I do agree with you that sharing conflicting points of view is good. Too much passion, however, can cloud reason.