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Comment by cuddlecake | Hacker News Reader

Sounds weird if you phrase it in a weird way, yes.

Just like communicating with strangers via on-demand electric currents is weird as well, if you phrase it like that.

I have been thinking about this weirdness a lot. In my book communicating via electric currents while seeming weird, isn't because of it's pure practicality. Digitizing these currents instead of transmiting an analog signal seems weird, but isn't because it allows faster, errorfree and more diverse communications etc.

You can go on and follow the technical developement, but you will inevitably reach a point where people stopped understanding the whole stack below them and instead started to cobble together new abstractions from the things they did – until the next generation came and abstracted that. We all know this – it is far easier to add onto something existing, than removing or changing existing things that are just not good enough for the things we want.

So at a certain point you stop doing the rational and efficient thing to solve a problem, but react to more or less organically grown structures and go a extra mile to solve problems you might have never had if you included these capabilities in the existing layers below. But the existing layers below were written ages ago in languages you hate by obscure circles talking on mailing lists, so we don't even bother. The resulting Rube-Goldberg-Machine is weird in that sense: nobody rational who understands all the layers would plan it like it is from the ground up if they had the choice.

> "In my book..."

As I was reading, for a second there I thought you'd actually written a book called "Communicating via electric currents seems weird". Sounds amazing! Where can I buy this book??

Haha sounds amazing indeed, I'll put it on my list : )

I parsed the book name as 'Communicating via electric currents' then my brain threw an exception.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/382507.The_Telephone_Boo...

A 10X programmer or 100X programmer finds a way to remove layers of abstractions.

Just hide the nasty layers behind more facades or layers of abstraction. Please never reinvent the wheel, we need more layers, its better software design to reuse the old stuff.

yep, I mean technically you could directly write the UI directly to IP packets and cut out the whole stack, but it's a step in the wrong direction, abstraction allows people to specialize and focus on their domain.

For a non technical example we could communicate via math for all human interaction, it would be more efficient, and truthful, it would also limit though and transfer of knowledge as it puts difficult constraints on expression.

Stacks are good, the web got screwed up by SUN, IBM, and Oracle's insistent vision of a thin client world, that needed lots of servers.

I'm actually shocked at the downvotes. The previous post was discussing the problem of all the layers of abstractions, and I was pointing out that a "10x programmer" could be getting 10x results by finding ways around those abstractions.

Probably because HN is mostly frequented by programmers, and not managers or "startup entrepreneurs" who throw around terms like "10x programmer" as if it's a thing that actually exists, and not a harmful concept that at best promotes gatekeeping and at worst promotes egotists who believe that their sloppy shortcuts won't have to be cleaned up by everyone else when they inevitably fail.

I thought I originally heard about the 10x programmer thing from some of Chuck Moore's talks on Forth. So I went to re-find this article.

But as it turns out he was arguing against 10x complexity and advocating avoiding abstractions with "1x" coding.

http://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm

Well, I can think of good reasons for communicating using electricity. It's fast. The infrastructure is available. I can think of good reasons to communicate with strangers. It's interesting, strangers are interesting.

I can't think of a good reason for depending on thousands of libraries to aid you in laying out and presenting a document, if you are using a language and a platform specifically designed for that purpose.

I can push ideas into other people mind by sending carefully created pressure waves at them

I'd argue, one is simply weird because you're (or your hypothetical audience) is not used to it. The other is weird because it's mainly that way due to path dependency.

Yep even explaining what happens to give you a dial tone on a landline is pretty crazy when you first look into it.

It surprises many people to learn that the tone isn’t “always there” and that signalling happens with the exchange to create it. This includes checking billing status and other things.

These systems are so robust we mostly take them for granted.

Not to mention how weird speech is if you try to explain it to in a similar manner.

All the critical comments on this. Why are all these critics so scared that there might be an easier way to do web dev?

Are they really just protecting their archane methods because they see that as protecting their income and any simplification a threat to that?

Or is it more tribal, cult like adherence to an overbloated way of creating web UIs?

Or is it people don't want to learn yet another tool and they're just resigned to the fact the these are the tools they have because really, they don't get to decide that anyway, their employer does?

Or is it people don't like being reminded that actually, they're "forced" to use these tools (which they perhaps wouldn't if it wasn't mandated), but because the workplace uses them, they use them, so the existence of other options while accurate is a painful reminder of their own limited autonomy to individually decide the tools they use for their work?

Is the same cultish zealotry seen in other languages and frameworks or is it just (what compiles to) ECMAscript and Web UI/state frameworks?

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