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Comment by dpeterson | Hacker News Reader

This article says more to me that the author(s) are inexperienced themselves rather than shed any light on the practice of software development. I'm imagining some recent boot camp graduates attempting to conflate their months of programming experience into something more than that. "Hey old dudes in company I just joined, I found some things I think are basic so I'm going to write an article to indirectly shame you in hopes our manager will see how valuable I am already." They know something isn't quite impressive about their older co-workers but this list isn't it and the authors don't even come close to being experienced enough to put a box around it and be thought leaders of any kind.

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This comment is classic bulverism. You need to explain how the author is wrong to have a valid argument.

Eh, I won't be that harsh. The author is clearly getting experienced in software development. I actually like ambitious engineers who write from their own perspective. Most engineers (1) are fairly go-along to get-along types -- team-oriented folks. Someone with the interest and communication skills to improve things should be encouraged and (if needed) mentored.

(1) Most engineers we notice could be blowhards. They tend to be a minority of any particular engineering community.

I don't think these accusations are fair. The author has been programming since at least 2009, and is degreed in math. They also wrote the "think in math write in code article" that people here seemed to like quite a bit last week.

Programming in academia has very little to do with software in general, maybe that's the disconnect.

If you look at his resume from a sibling comment of the one you were replying to, you’ll see that his experience is in industry, not academia

He's also arguing that code is math, which is academic bullshit at it's finest.

Abstract Algebra makes it way into code sometimes...

https://mikhail.io/2018/07/monads-explained-in-csharp-again/

You can express mathematical abstractions in code, this doesn't imply that one is a subtype of the other. You can express a lot of things in code that have nothing to do with math.

> The author has been programming since at least 2009

Which is to say, since the author was 12 years old if they followed a standard K-12 + undergrad program (graduated from a Utah Valley University last year it seems).

I think the irony in the article is that the author is very likely 22 or 23 years old and opining about how developers that have been coding for longer than he's been alive still just-don't-get-it. I guess you'd just expect this kind of article from someone with more experience in the field.

I did like this, however:

> Poorly designed software lacks conceptual integrity...It usually looks like a giant Rube Goldberg machine that haphazardly sets state and triggers events.

That is, it seems, the modern web :)

>Which is to say, since the author was 12 years old if they followed a standard K-12 + undergrad program (graduated from a Utah Valley University last year it seems).

Graduated the university in 3 years (check the dates), which doesn't nullify your proposition, but it makes as likely the other possibilities, such as that they went to university well into their adult life, applying credits from a previous (unlisted) university career.

Given he has work experience from prior to his university dates, it’s more likely that he got his degree after having already worked for a few years.

I think it would be more useful if you could provide specific criticism - i.e what you think is wrong and why. Your comment seems rather general. I could imagine copying and pasting it beneath a wide variety of articles and it would be equally applicable.

People new to the industry aren't always aware of how those "good practices" are simply a product of the industry zeitgeist. If you've just now gotten your feet wet, you're fully up-to-date.

For example, a preference towards writing pure functions might have gotten called-out during code review as recently as 10 years ago. Immutable programming can result in a larger memory footprint and/or more GC activity and years ago that was considered a deal-breaker... even in environments with plenty of headroom RAM and CPU performance.

Amen, I don't even understand why this got upvoted ....

Just looking quickly at his about me page it seems he has at least 6 years programming experience, going by github projects, his oldest project The IOS color wheel argues for some level of skill/experience.

His CV suggests something otherwise. He is experienced.

https://justinmeiners.github.io/files/cv.pdf

Still doesn't get opening quotation marks right though....

If you notice in his CV, he doesn't have long term experience on single projects (Also doesn't have that much experience). I often see these types of posts, and I remember making similar kinds of comments around the 10 year mark, none of which are really invalid points, just there is more to it. I'm coming up 40 years of programming, and I'm way less clear on the essence of design and skills (which I have a lot of opionions about), but it is quite nuanced and often boils down to knowing the difference between "not enough" "just enough" "too much".

I'm curious where you think that he is mistaken? I enjoyed the post so it'd be useful to know why you didn't think it was valuable.

I have a feeling you felt hurt on those points?

Not even close

Please don't cross into personal attacks on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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