Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This Teflon you're talking about, it's a thing. Not just with CORS, not just with you.

For example, I've gotten decent at regular expressions a few times but have to keep relearning it. Adding insult to injury, I might relearn something from Stackoverflow, and realize afterwards I posted the answer!

Not for trivial stuff. But a string of punctuation with capture groups or whatever, forget about it [1].

Any support for this informal draft definition below?

------------------

Teflon tech (draft definition v0.1 [2])

Knowledge that could be learned by most with reasonable effort, but often must be relearned or is never fully grokked.

This can be due to infrequent opportunities to recall the concepts in a particular role, or insufficient need to apply (thereby practicing) the relevant techniques. It may also occur when a tech is used frequently but the foundational theory is hidden by the use of higher level abstractions.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1381097/how-do-i-get-the...

[2] content provided under MIT license.

I call it my intellectual immune system, but it might be more like a runaway process killer or an OOM-killer. It hates ugliness, and it hates complexity. I kind of appreciate its attempts to clean Javascript out of my brain. Even though it makes it frustrating to do front end tasks, I appreciate the good intentions.

In the 2000s I learned Perl no less than three times. I was really impressed by what people could do with small scripts and one-liners, and I wanted that power for myself. I got really good three times, and each time it took me less time to forget it than it took me to learn it. I did not agree with its decision in that case, but I lost the argument.

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of an unrelated analogy involving computer science and software engineering approaches 1.

I shall graciously accept this being called adtac's law out of sheer humility :P

More like: people rely on shared knowledge when communicating. This is Hacker News, after all.

I think the proposed definition is too sympathetic to the Teflon. Sometimes a whole approach is misconceived, yielding billowing complexity; it may be too hard to see through the fog to be sure of this in particular cases, but surely it happens. This can apply to the "foundational theory" too.

Probably some combination of things that break principle of least surprise along with not needing to think about that thing very frequently. A good IDE and good coding standards can smooth things over.

I'm ok with regex too, but if you asked me to do something with look-behind I'd have to experiment a little to figure out how it works again.

Javascript is like this with me. I have no idea why.

Probably my having a super low opinion of it's whole ecosystem doesn't help. ;)

I think it's 100% because you don't like Javascript. You resent having to learn it. I feel the exact same way about Git, I've never been able to stomach it, I'm bewildered as to why the entire programming community have decided it's the one VCS to rule them all, and I resent having to grok its UI.

The Javascript ecosystem is huge. It's also the wild west, completely non-curated, open to anyone, and you have to treat it accordingly. It's not really one entity.

Git is amazing, beautiful piece of software.

But... sigh I feel exactly how you feel about Git about Vim. It's the one editor everyone has decided despite it's arcane and bizarre UX that you aren't a real programmer if you don't know.

Refuse to learn it. Absolutely refuse.

I think everyone has one of those things.

I have at least 2. Git and vim. It seems fitting then, that vim should be the default editor for git's commit messages.

Hahahaha. Hot damn. Oh that would really get my goat.

I only just read this comment. It is golden. Now we should just bookmark this comment and use the term teflon tech as often as possible to make it stick (euhm...)

Yeah I keep regex syntax pinned up at my desk because it always gets cache-flushed beyond the basics even if I used it yesterday.

Anki

Reply on news.ycombinator.com