Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Burn the Programmer

antipope.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 254 posts

Re: Burn the Programmer

#51

Post by b0rsuk »

dkarl wrote: post #37
everyone wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt that wizard thing when I was just starting out, for most of my career though, i've thought an apt analogy is tradesman. eg. carpenter or metalworker. We get commissioned to build something that does X. Then we design and build it. With experience we develop our own tools / practices and a familiarity with our materials. Experienced masters might experiment and develop completely novel things or masterworks. So…

I think most people look at skilled construction contractors and assume they could be just as good with a very small amount of study and practice. People see us as having a completely alien ability that they intrinsically lack. That makes us like Harry Potter wizards, people with an inborn gift that makes us capable of learning things that are beyond the reach of normal people. The difference between us and wizards i…

That's quite true. When you say you're a plumber, people can at least ask half-assed questions or provide a story when they were doing that themselves. When you say you're a programmer, the conversation usually ends with "Oh.". They have literally no clue how to get into the area.

How many of you have girlfriends who are genuinely interested in your craft and regularly talk with you about it ? Say, once per week. But if you're a photographer, that's instantly understandable to anyone. Anyone can chime in.

This reminds me of the time when Charlie Chaplin said to his friend Albert Einstein: "People like me because everyone understands me. People like you because no one understands you."

Re: Burn the Programmer

#52

Post by jimbokun »

stryan wrote: post #10

Considering 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…

This is exactly the reason I despise Spring with a deep and abiding passion.

"Just add this dependency, and add these annotations to your class, and it will all Just Work."

"But...what do those annotations actually do?"

"Stop asking so many questions!"

I mean, I know the answers are out there, it's open source after all. But so much of it seems deliberately designed to obfuscate the flow of execution and make reasoning about the code as difficult as possible.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#53

Post by dboreham »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #31
gallerdude wrote: post #8

When I was a preteen, I'd watch Notch's ld48 programming streams, and I'd just be confused. I had read the basics of if-statements, for-loops, and functions, but he was using them in a way beyond my comprehension. Later I discovered MIT's Scratch, and it let me figure things out on my own: games, physics, genetic algorithms. I think programming is portrayed to be more difficult than it is. It's a mixture between prog…

Wait, you can do genetic algorithms in Scratch?

Infinite tape; party on...

Re: Burn the Programmer

#54

Post by coldcode »

I've never seen wizards in fantasy novels have to deal with myriads of JIRA tickets, attend interminable mind-numbing meetings and solve impossible dependency hells. I guess that's why they call it fantasy.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#55

Post by everyone »

mbrock wrote: post #26
everyone wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt that wizard thing when I was just starting out, for most of my career though, i've thought an apt analogy is tradesman. eg. carpenter or metalworker. We get commissioned to build something that does X. Then we design and build it. With experience we develop our own tools / practices and a familiarity with our materials. Experienced masters might experiment and develop completely novel things or masterworks. So…

I think the craft aspect is somewhat romanticized and that much of programming work is more like a kind of accounting or some other clerical bureaucratic trade.

Maybe you've been at it longer than me.. and as one gets more experienced/jaded ones analogies become less romantic.. Wizard!, tradesman, garbageman, bureaucrat... I hope it doesnt get down to politician!!

Also software is a huge field and where u work in it probably has an effect. I never do internety stuff for example, I make computer games.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#56

Post by thinkpad20 »

jimbokun wrote: post #52
stryan wrote: post #10

Considering 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…

This is exactly the reason I despise Spring with a deep and abiding passion. "Just add this dependency, and add these annotations to your class, and it will all Just Work." "But...what do those annotations actually do ?" "Stop asking so many questions!" I mean, I know the answers are out there, it's open source after all. But so much of it seems deliberately designed to obfuscate the flow of execution and make reason…

That's exactly how I feel about express middleware...

Re: Burn the Programmer

#57

Post by AndrewDucker »

j2kun wrote: post #29

It makes me wonder if there are any realms of wizardry where the highest ranking wizards spend all their time on management skills and never get to practice their magic. "Oh, these days I just review a lot of spell-design scrolls and mentor junior acolytes. Magic is more of a people business, you know."

The senior staff at Unseen University in Pratchett's Discworld series are a lot like this.

Re: Burn the Programmer

#58

Post by b0rsuk »

everyone wrote: post #21
marsrover wrote: post #3

You know, us programmers like to refer to ourselves as wizards but I really wonder if non-programmers think the same or is it just like any other profession they're not knowledgeable of? I don't know anything about chemical engineering but I've never considered chemical engineers to be magical. I do like thinking of myself as a wizard, though.

I felt that wizard thing when I was just starting out, for most of my career though, i've thought an apt analogy is tradesman. eg. carpenter or metalworker. We get commissioned to build something that does X. Then we design and build it. With experience we develop our own tools / practices and a familiarity with our materials. Experienced masters might experiment and develop completely novel things or masterworks. So…

If you want to impress people as a programmer, I think it helps to have imagination and side projects. Visual programming is nice, too (like SVG).

Re: Burn the Programmer

#59

Post by chungy »

fermigier wrote: post #16

"...Ever tried to set up a Postfix server?" is the new "...Ever tried to set up a Sendmail server?". (When I was younger, I was told by a veteran sysadmin that only 5 persons in the world knew how to configure Sendmail directly, everyone else was relying on preprocessing scripts written by the aforementioned wizards). Edit: my point is that Postfix is actually quite easy to configure, compared to Sendmail which was t…

I've picked Postfix entirely because Exim is difficult and overkill for my purposes...

Re: Burn the Programmer

#60

Post by heptathorp »

weeksie wrote: post #24

It's definitely an old metaphor. SICP is the "Wizard Book" after all, and IIRC they even used the term "incantations" to describe commands and programming constructs at some points, though it's been well over a decade since I've leafed through it.

We conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
Post reply on HN