Consider it an ephemeral craft to accomplish goals, whether business or otherwise. Code will never be perfect and most of it is a mess. Someone can explore Pony, Idris, or make an Arduino to ring a cowbell on the weekend.
How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
61–70 of 373 posts
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#62I 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 learned this the hard way. Thought I was special and passionate and hard working. Then I had a mental breakdown and could barely get anything done. All of a sudden money became the top priority I started seeing the world for what it really is.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Awe and contempt are basically the same feeling, but with the charge flipped. The author is amazed that it works to the degree that it does, you're amazed a how things don't work the way you want them to. Such is the power of framing, I guess.
I used to get emotional like this about programming, both the awe and the contempt depending on circumstances. Now, after 30 years, it's just work. I don't really feel anything about it. And that's kind of the way everything is. Nothing is new or exciting. I wake up, work, do household stuff, eat, go to bed. That's life. Not interesting, not depressing, just neutral.
>Not interesting, not depressing, just neutral.
The absence of feelings sounds exactly like depression.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#64I 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…
> We can make up little myths about how we romantics are obviously more passionate, work harder because it's our dream, are more deeply engaged, and so on.
This comment stuck out for me. There’s no shortage of people who “love their job” who aren’t actually good at their job. They can be very motivated to do the wrong thing and often have unearned egos.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#65I'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 no third parties, just the programmer and their code. Working in or more importantly leading a team mandates a different approach by putting aside aesthetic considerations for more pragmatic ones that will satisfy all parties involved.
It's hard to be romantic in corporate environments.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#66I dont really understand the point of this article. Literally any system can be made romantic for the sheer fact that everything has spent hundreds of man-hours building up to it. The cheapest possible ballpoint pen is made up of years of research into the plastics, the machinery required to create bearings with the tolerances necessary, the exact chemical makeup of the ink etc etc. It just seems to be a waste of bra…
Yes, the construction of a ballpoint pen could be made romantic. But I mean...it's pretty incredible how many humans collaborate to produce the ballpoint pen, millions of individuals cooperating in countless ways, producing an essential implement which is greater than the sum of its parts. No one involved could tell you exactly how the pen is made, and yet it's sold at a price so low we never think about it. There is…
Sometimes it makes me dizzy - you pick up some ordinary thing, and suddenly marvel at all the people, all the work and effort, that goes into making the most mundane things. Odes to Common Things is a reminder of how amazing the universe is - the natural and the things we create.
“A book, a book full of human touches, of shirts, a book without loneliness, with men and tools, a book is victory.” ― Pablo Neruda, Odes to Common Things
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#67I 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…
> But answering the question literally, I am not representative of everyone in the industry,
I am deeply /deeply/ romantic about programming, but industry is dreck. Unimaginative, low potential, sapping, low-ambition, filled with endless middle- & low-roads & compromises. Countless stakeholders, endless non-technical-personals to "reason" with. Plans & designs & endless corporate aligning & planning. All for middling corporate plans, faint progress, carried forward under the weight of countless legacy systems & terrible decisions.
Programming & open source is this limitless potential, this endless imagineering & exploration. We are unencumbered by anything beyond what we might imagine, what we might want to do, free to think of how we want to represent, structure, develop things.
Not everyone is into programming for the same reasons. But I find increasing distance, increasing inability to articulate to others how amazing being a programmer is, what expressiveness & power we have, how unencumbered & free we are. Even if others don't share the ambition & sense of grandiosity, don't feel the immense pull of the vast humanistic work that we distinctly are the crafters & doers of, there's still such power to create & share & inform that is so rewarding, so immense, so imminent in the craft, & I deeply deeply crave seeing some recognition, somewhere, of some of it- of themselves!- at some level, in my fellow peers. It's ok if we have different reasons, different motivations, different engagements, but there is a might of human potential here that programmers are so uniquely connected to, so immersed in, and I want these fish to realize the water about them, even if they only aspire to be small fish.
I affirm strongly the question: how indeed can you not be romantic about programming?
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#68> There are lines of code floating around on our computers that haven’t been executed by a machine in years and probably won’t be for another lifetime. Others are the golden threads of this world, holding it together at the seams without no more than a dozen people knowing about it. Remove one of these and it all comes crashing down. Beautifully said, although I find it rather horrifying.
But this is what Taleb and Zizek have been drawing attention to for years, its just that this predicament is the case at every level of society
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#69I've been programming since my early teens > 25 years ago. The article asks "How can you not be romantic about programming"? And I have to say, that after all these years, I am romantic about programming...only sometimes, now.
For one, programming a lot made me very near-sighted, and my eyes are dry to the point that I can no longer wear contacts. (I had a bad episode and nearly went blind a couple years back.) That really blows, because I used to like surfing and other outdoor activities that are seriously curtailed by thick glasses. Take care of your eyes!
Second, I am mostly not romantic about programming because I feel like I am swimming against the tide most of the time. Stuff changes so fast and so much; there is so much fad and passing fashions, and what's the rage these days is tomorrow's cargo cult. What's today's cargo cult started as an offhand comment with a kernel of truth that far too many people took far too seriously. It's never the right things that change, either. We keep changing syntax and IDEs and environments and frameworks, and yet we're still fighting memory management bugs in 2021. A very stubborn cult of performance worshippers have successfully defended the bottom layers of software from being rewritten in safe languages (putting safety at priority #1 for 4+ decades). I'm willing to pay 15% performance for this layer to just be forever ridden of this, but people treat me like an alien.
Third, people have complained about programmers being lazy and wasteful since the beginning of time, but we've truly jumped the shark. Build times for C++ (and Rust) are just insane. To think, dozens of cores, cranking away for minutes at a time, trillions upon trillions upon trillions of calculations just to output a little binary. Being a compiler person, and knowing some details about what is going on inside those compilers makes me want to cry. It's insanely wasteful.
Fourth, the arguing. There have been tribes and flamewars and a toxic culture since forever, but really, it feels so hard to express how disappointed I am in the whole shit, without adding to the whole shit and making the whole atmosphere even worse. I vacillate between wanting to yell at clouds and being sick of hearing people yelling at clouds! I'm simultaneously sick of being shouted at and on the edge of being shouting mad!
But, there are bright spots. CPUs are insanely fast, and there is memory enough for everything. Stuff crashes less. But yeah, everything is a tangle and huger heap of shit than ever.
Re: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
#70Cash rules everything around me.
After a few decades of relying on coding to feed my family, I miss the way it felt magical, writing in Basic on a ti 99/4a.
I thought I was going to tell computers to do wonderous things. In reality most of us are telling them to serve ads or sell crap to people. Most of the rest of us are telling them to serve data to companies doing the above.
It’s just business now, nothing more.