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Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

What a clickbait, provocative article with nothing beyond a single anecdote, not even a second one other than the generic "you've never written assembly so you're not a programmer" comment. Seriously has anyone heard a programmer say this in the last 10 years?

Elitism exists everywhere and I don't see how software development is any better or worse than the rest. We have an arrogant vocal minority just like everyone else, it just so happens they are the people for whom blogging and displaying their arrogance has a lower barrier to entry than for other groups.

》 Coding academies have opened new doors for people with a variety of backgrounds, many who couldn’t afford a more traditional four-year computer science degree, or may have been steered clear of a technical degree in college (or younger) due to societal pressures or family culture, just to name a couple.

BAM. 'nuff said. Why bring elitism into this?

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Not only this, but in the conclusion you get this pearl: "learning on your own is neither efficient nor cost-effective when factoring in time spent."

And now everybody learns the same way?

I can tell you that for a self-taught person, learning by yourself is much faster and deeper than being taught by someone.

> "learning on your own is neither efficient nor cost-effective when factoring in time spent."

Tell that to John Carmack.

>BAM. 'nuff said. Why bring elitism into this?

I guess because the author feels insecure about the accusations leveled against his company - that they toss out underqualified developers.

He wants it to be made clear that his type of elitism (running a big important software company) trumps your kind of elitism (knowing all about pointers, assembly, big O notation and data structures).

Something like that anyway :/

Almost every time a PHP or JavaScript project is brought up here, the fact that it's written in PHP or JavaScript is always used to negatively comment on the project and author. Just because someone doesn't like a language, they see fit to demean the author.

Edit: Even better, someone has already done that in the comments here on HN for this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10637947

It is extremely hard to maintain good and safe codebase in both languages. Which is important when you make code that other people use. Above couple of hundred lines of code you need either some form of type safety or very talented and disciplined programmers.

You're commiting the same exact mistake the article is. This is the vocal minority who is, you know, vocal and unrepresentative of all software developers, the majority of whom have little to say about the religious battles on online forums and don't give a damn about programming except to feed their families.

If you want an example of a real problem of elitism go look at the metastudies on narcissism, which talk about how the selection process for surgeons (brain surgeons especially) tends to select for egomaniacs and results in a very politically charged industry.

> at the metastudies on narcissism, which talk about how the selection process for surgeons (brain surgeons especially) tends to select for egomaniacs and results in a very politically charged industry

Are there any surprising findings there, or is it just what you could reasonably expect after putting people through 10+ years of life-sucking training, deep in debt, to work on the most complicated thing humans ever had to deal with - but under time pressure and tremendous emotional load?

Not really. Doctors are part of a very science/research heavy industry so most of the serious research is focused on them but the relatively few sources available on lawyers have the same conclusions about competitive, economic, and intellectual incentives selecting for a very narrow class of people. The really interesting part comes when you expand your outlook beyond the Western research world (which very few metastudies in psychology do, unfortunately) where these results aren't always so clear cut. It appears that a culture such as the one in India or Cuba, which heavily emphasizes education in family life, can have turn a lot of that arrogance into humility.

I think people can write good code in PHP and JS and I think those standards for what is "good" have been elevated a lot in the past 5 years. PHP and JS still seem to carry this tarnished reputation with a lot of people and so many (especially in IRC) immediately discredit it with some hyperbole. Yeah both languages have their shortcomings, but there are so many patterns in place to use that can make the code well structured, perform well, maintain well, etc. If there is one thing that drives me up the wall a bit, it's people who go on sites like this one and internalize all the PHP and JS hate without hardly ever using them. By the time they have to at some point they already hate it so much that any part of the language that is "different" is now a negative quality.

Swap the meaningless "real programmer" to a much better defined "efficient programmer", and all the seemingly "elitist" comments will start to make a lot of sense.

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