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Comment by pepijndevos | Hacker News Reader

What I miss from this article is what he does know. Not to boats, but to contrast. I know some of the things he does not know, and I'm sure he knows things I don't know. But without knowing what his expertise is, it's easy to think you know more than him.

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I think the assumed background for the reader is knowing who Dan Abramov is - he's the guy who started Redux, and is currently on the React team.

The rest of his blog so far is basically about things he does know.

In the spirit of this page: I don't have a clue what Redux or React are.

React is an extremely popular web front end library developed primarily by Facebook. Redux is an important library commonly used with React.

Thank you!

He's one of the most prominent React core developers. The author of Redux etc. Many JavaScript and React developers (myself included) consider him a rockstar.

You don’t think that’s a problem? I don’t think there’s any value in being a name in programming. There is certainly value in a dollar sense (to their own career prospects at least), but I don’t understand why people would be like “wow! It’s $name! They’re famous!”

If someone non-junior knew no shell scripting and had no FP knowledge — or thought that JavaScript counts as FP [spoiler alert: it doesn’t] — I wouldn’t hire them.

Personally I’m not saying JavaScript “counts” as FP — which is why the post says “unless _you_ count”. ;-) But there are certainly FP subcultures in the JS community which only use the functional subset:

https://github.com/jfmengels/eslint-plugin-fp

https://github.com/fantasyland/fantasy-land

https://ramdajs.com/

That subculture is what I was referring to.

If you’re splitting hairs over such definitions without acknowledging the cultural aspect and use that as a hiring criteria I wouldn’t want to work with you either.

Culture means different things to different people. If a candidate were to suggest they were only interested in the “pragmatic parts of FP”, implying that developing an understanding of category theory is somehow frivolous and not pragmatic (which I think you did earlier), I would acknowledge this as a poor culture fit.

you're arguing with the guy that built redux and he's being nice about it. you think maybe you should reconsider your position?

I’m well aware of who I am addressing. It seems you’re implying we should make special allowances for people depending on how popular they are. My entire point is that I won’t take someone at their name; I completely reject the idea of the “celebrity” programmer. Redux is pretty neat; IIRC it was a state store influenced by Elm and implemented in about 50 lines of JavaScript. But there are plenty of developers — even popular open-source contributors — who don’t have the same anti-intellectual position of rejecting CT because it isn’t “pragmatic”.

my point is exactly not how popular he is but how accomplished he is and how condescending he could be (since he is so popular and accomplished) and how gracious he is being to you. it's like those movies where someone is starting a fight (giving cause) with a person 10x their size and then the bigger person gracefully declining to batter - it should make you reconsider who's the protagonist...

So yes, you are exactly giving special treatment to someone you perceive to be of greater merit owing to their popularity.

Your position is that I should not argue against Dan Abramov because you perceive him to be relatively accomplished. This is an embarrassing point of view.

Burn your idols.

> who don’t have the same anti-intellectual position of rejecting CT because it isn’t “pragmatic”

Where are you getting anti-intellectualism, rejection of category theory, or a defense of pragmatism at the expense of either of those things? Who is this directed at?

Reading back up this thread, you're the only person referring to those, unless I'm missing an edit somewhere.

You had me worried for a moment; I also couldn't find where I had read that, so I thought either I had misquoted him or he had edited something.

But, no. Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18783434

This. Never heard of Dan before today. Now he is "a guy on the Internet who writes about programming but doesn't know much about it".

He invented Redux, and is a core contributor to React.

Honestly, hearing that a core contributor to React doesn’t know much of anything about basic engineering topics is disheartening, not encouraging.

Not memorizing the algorithm book is one thing, but being considered a “rockstar” when you don’t know basic sorting algorithms...

He knows (is aware of) what he doesn’t know: you can be sure that he will learn by himself or seek someone with more knowledge when he faces a challenge involving a new (to him) topic / concept / technology.

Being a rockstar is more often a matter of being able to work in your field effectively and efficiently. He's not a savant, and he's not working in a space where knowing sorting algorithms is meaningful to his day to day activity. He's still great at how job and the space he works in, and not knowing these things doesn't heavily affect that

That’s mostly just an indictment of the Javascript space, not a defense of lacking fundamental knowledge.

I don’t routinely write sorting algorithms either, but I know what they are, how they differ, and how to implement them. And it’s useful knowledge - it comes up often in lots of domains.

I see lots of comments about how this is a bold stance against “imposter syndrome”, but at some point, it isn’t a syndrome. There really is basic knowledge that defines professional competence in this field, and it can’t be replaced by github stars.

Consider that actual rock stars often aren't the world's best musicians from a purely technical perspective - but they're experts at delivering what their audience wants.

Dan made a bit of a name for himself in a couple of ways I can think of: creating a very popular library (Redux) and communicating extremely well in English about React and Redux.

"Able to communicate about with a broad audience about complex technical topics" is a skill I wish more developers had.

So he's able to create things his audience wants and then communicate to his audience about those things. Sounds exactly like a rock star to me.

That's meant as a compliment, not an insult. The ability to communicate well and the ability to be honest about you don't know are two things the developer community needs more of.

I’ll grant you this: unless you’re actually playing music to sold-out stadiums, “Rock star” is an insipid, meaningless phrase. I’m not trying to debate the definition. Likewise, I’m not interested in the technical qualifications to be a “communicator”. There are clearly few technical standards for fame.

In every other field of engineering, there are standards of knowledge and competency. Software is notable, in that not only are there no standards, but we actually see the glorification of ignorance of even basic knowledge.

There are lots of bad, popular github projects (particularly in the JS universe, where the bar for competency is already quite low) and having a popular project is not prima facie evidence of engineering skill (how many projects was the string-reversing NPM module breaking, again?) Which is to take nothing from the author; I don’t particularly care about his level of skill, nor am I saying his projects are bad. The argument is not about the author.

What I care about is when someone says “hey, I’m ignorant of the basics of the field in which I work, but it’s OK, because I work on a big, famous project.”, and people interpret that to mean that their ignorance is dandy, too. There are dozens of comments to this effect on this page (cf every comment that mentions “impostor syndrome”)

It’s OK to not know things. It’s OK to be a beginner. It’s not OK to excuse yourself from knowing things you really should know as a professional, because someone else got famous without that knowledge.

Way I see it is it's more than OK to not know things -- it's a necessary optimization. Engineering is all about tradeoffs, and skills development is no exception. Follow one path, forego another; dive deep, sacrifice breadth (and vice versa).

So consider that maybe, just maybe, for a developer working full-time on a SPA framework, not knowing Docker or Bash scripting might not be a real impediment to working effectively or delivering quality product. If it were, perhaps React & Redux wouldn't be as great as they are. And since they are great, maybe we should consider that fact not as a celebrity get-out-of-jail-free card, but as counterevidence to your implication that these topics all constitute a universal educational imperative, and that someone lacking in any of these areas is by definition not a professional in the software field.

React is on my list of things I don’t know. : )

Hi, author here.

Maybe you can read some other articles on the blog (it’s new so there’s not many) to get a sense of my interests.

I also have a StackOverflow profile: https://stackoverflow.com/users/458193/dan-abramov

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