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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

> As an added bonus, those casts will fend off the occasional frontend developer who accidentally wanders into the codebase.

https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture

Code that intentionally celebrates its unapproachability is not a badge of honor or pride, even as a joke. It might occasionally be an unavoidable necessity, in which case it needs enough documentation that the next person who has to deal with it has the best chance possible.

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You are quoting a self-deprecating joke. I care deeply about my code being readable, which can be quite challenging when writing high-performance code close to the metal. I'm self-consciously aware of every tricky bit I put in my code. I have to be confident it's worth it (usually because it makes things faster in the real world) and offset the added complexity by writing documentation.

I mean, I think that was a bit of a joke. It's ironic that you rail against this dude for "code that's hard to understand" in reply to a long-form prose article about understanding the code and how it got there..

We'll probably have to agree to disagree.. but that blog post doesn't really resonate for me... especially the end where it talks about keep it to your "own language." I've never had patience for identity politics especially in the case of a god-damn programming language.

> It's ironic that you rail against this dude for "code that's hard to understand"

I'm sure that it was a joke, and that doesn't make it better. I'm not suggesting that this code was hard to understand, and I enjoyed the article. I'm calling out this particular point, and suggesting that even as a joke, mocking "frontend developers" is very much from the same territory that promotes "Real Programming" and mocks people for their choice of programming language or technology.

I mean it is pretty true that most frontend developers do not have the inclination to go trodding into a C++ code base making syscalls without a wrapper. Even taken uncharitably seriously, that is all the comment was insinuating. Everything else is added by you the reader.

And anyway I'm fine with exclusively frontend devs staying out of systems stuff. Anyone that wants to read OS kernel and compiler source code has tons of choices. Most I've talked to find it dry and boring. They don't belong there... that's fine.

This comment is off topic and trying to bait an argument off of a single throwaway line in the article.

That was clearly tongue-in-cheek. No need to rail against the author. Lay down the outrage pitchforks man.

Where are the outrage pitchforks? The comment was extremely calm. Why is any mild, polite criticism or disagreement perceived as "railing against the author"??

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