Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

I think Zed Shaw is immensely entertaining. I really enjoyed "Rails is a ghetto". I think he did good work on Mongrel/Mongrel2. I first discovered ZeroMQ because Zed Shaw spoke highly of it. He clearly knows some things.

But this essay is like something from the alternate timeline where Donald Trump became a computer programmer.

He pretends to be unconcerned with the issue, despite writing multiple posts this week, each the size of a short book:

"I was tired and not into defending myself so I just deleted Twitter off my phone and go sleep some more. Enjoy the sun. Did some painting. Hung out with friends."

He insults his perceived critics:

"Who gives a fuck about what a bunch of angry lonely coders think about my thoughts?"

He invents weird agglomerations:

"These groups of programmers used to have large sway over what was successful and chosen, but at the same time were horribly uninformed about basic computer science. They ran to Node.js because of “events are better than threads” and had no idea Hoare or coroutines existed. "

So, it is the older and experienced programmers who ran to NodeJS? Does anyone believe that to be true?

I suppose this is at least a refreshing reversal of stereotypes?

"For all their claims of superiority for having once bought a copy of The Art of Computer Programming the previous generation of programmers are sadly uninformed about basic shit."

He validates himself by how much money he is making:

"my sales were up and my traffic was about the same."

Seriously, this is the Donald Trump version of computer programming.

And I say this as someone who has learned a lot from Shaw.

I think that kind of nitpicking is exactly the thing he is trying to avoid.

It may not look like it from the inside but the HN crowd is a very distinct, and very opinionated, bubble in the wider world of CompSci and Engineering. It looks like a lot of this crowd seems to enthusiastically cheer things that are not worthy of cheering (like overly-complicated solutions to problems, innovations that are really just repackaged ideas from 20/30/40 years ago, blind faith in the cloud, etc).

Now the HN crowd has its reasons -- things are the way they are because of team constrains and ever-present Business Decisions -- but I think a lot of the crowd has become very disconnected from the wider world of computers and engineering in their quest to churn out cloud businesses ad nauseam. There are entirely different communities rocking entirely different paradigms, and frankly they don't usually inflate the pace of change for innovations' sake.

If you have something you'd like to criticize, you should do so with specifics. Criticism this vague does not add anything to the conversation:

"It looks like a lot of this crowd seems to enthusiastically cheer things that are not worthy of cheering (like overly-complicated solutions to problems, innovations that are really just repackaged ideas from 20/30/40 years ago, blind faith in the cloud, etc)."

I don't feel like getting into a debate with you, but "overly-complicated solutions" was a criticism that was often aimed at Enterprise solutions coming from Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and others. Remember Struts? Even Zope was guilty of this, at least until Zope 3. When HackerNews was getting going circa 2005, it was very much part of the rebellion against all that.

The only specific that you offered was "blind faith in the cloud" and yet there have been several articles this month, critical of the cloud, that made it to the front page of HackerNews. So it seems you are either vague or wrong.

I offer this simply as general advice which you might want to consider for the future.

There's an almost Onion-esque level of irony in your reply having no sources for anything you said.

Yep, I had to re-read NodeJS comment twice. I usually only hear criticism about it coming from "old time programmers".

Btw, I am a fan of Zed's books, and think that NodeJS sometimes can be an appropriate tool depending on the problem.

> Seriously, this is the Donald Trump version of computer programming.

If the analogy has any value, he needs to win anything out of the blue.

BTW, who is the Hillary of computer programming?

Perfectly correct punning carried out in a typeless flavor of BASIC, with the ghost of Dijkstra hovering above, yelling "criminal!"

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