What John Locke Can Teach You About Software Development | Hacker News Reader

What John Locke Can Teach You About Software Development

mahdiyusuf.com

18 pointsmyusuf312 comments

Anyone else expecting the 17th century philosopher?

I was hoping for it.

haha i think you missing the point. It's good software development practices. Not who I can extract an allegory from.

Somehow I think a case could be made that radical empiricism is a useful model for software development...i.e. one's a priori ideas about customers, markets, and the utility of software are not as useful as customer feedback:

And if our dreamer pleases to try whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man's fancy, by putting his hand into it, he may perhaps be wakened into a certainty greater than he could wish

http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/johnlocke/BOOKIVChap...

It makes me really sad that for a lot of people John Locke == some dude from some shitty show.

I was expecting the philosopher, but was pleasantly surprised when it was the Lost character.

That being said, this article is more of a funny article about Lost targeted at programmers than it is an article about important software development practices inspired by Lost.

Yep. Now "Calvin and Hobbes", that would be another story.

John Locke is a Cargo Cult programmer. He parrots the code without understanding it.

In the context of the series, John ran on faith, Jack on science. John ended up dead, and used as a pawn, without ever really having understood anything.

Not to split hairs but by the shows conclusion Jack is dead and I'd argue no closer to understanding anything either.

True, although I think the growth of Jack's character was written as a transition to a man of faith, so I'm not sure where that leaves us.

LOST was a nice ride, but writers failed to make sense of it.

6. Nobody can tell you what you can't do.

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