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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

Why is that we praise hand-crafted objects in the real world while at the same time deriding such hand-crafted code as a quaint curiosity that can only make sense as a hobby of the hopelessly romantic?

Do we compare your local carpenter with IKEA, or that delicious, nutritive and healthly meal you cooked with McDonald's, in terms of pure (developer) performance?

Do we obsess over how a handmade jewelrer can't scale operations to five continents?

Why do we copycat every process or idea from tech behemoths but laugh when someone tells us that maybe a chat client shouldn't gobble up gigs of RAM?

In the real world, both craft workshops and assembly lines have their place. Maybe that should be true for the digital world as well.

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>Why is that we praise hand-crafted objects in the real world while at the same time deriding such hand-crafted code [...] In the real world, both craft workshops and assembly lines have their place. Maybe that should be true for the digital world as well.

I'm not sure what the complaint is here. The concept of "hand-crafted software" _is_ being praised. Consider:

+ the domain url exists : https://handmade.network/ ... this means some enthusiasts spent money to host a focal point for showcasing the work to others

+ the submission is currently on the frontpage of HN ... which means it was upvoted many times (more than 50+ as of this writing)

+ comments in this thread showing appreciation of it

Are you annoyed that there isn't universal absolute flattery because a few want to mention caveats of tradeoffs? Well, that's true of any piece of technology/method.

Yes, it's being praised here (however this is also in the "hobby" context, supporting my argument somewhat).

But what I am saddend, more than annoyed, about, is that it's extremely lopsided in general.

I don't have a tally, but reading HN and other tech sources (HN is not an outlier here), these kinds of stories are buried under the mountain of articles and resources that hype up the "software industrial complex" (for lack of better description).

Software industrial complex is a great description.

Everything is about software; thus the collective incentivizing of writing more and more software. We see it as a bad sign when the commits stop flowing. Despite the source being there, it is viewed as stagnant.

Nobody even stops to ask if the project is simply done, and doesn't need anything else.

I mean, with how connected most computers are these days, even something as simple as a phone charger needs security updates.

Because our technical culture has been colonized by business interests to the point that people cannot tell the difference anymore.

Many comments on this thread show an unwillingness to even consider alternate technical aesthetics. Everything has to be about Creating Business Value, as if that's somehow the most important thing in life.

There is a trifecta of the art of code, the art of discipline (engineering), and the art of servicing others (business).

A core challenge is that "success" in the modern day starts with business --> engineering --> art.

Like, you will read countless articles of "sit with your customer" or "customer obsession" or "code first and you will fail", but that is from the perspective that business > engineering > art.

Handmade exists such that art > engineering > business.

I praise it just like I praise a handmade piece of furniture made by a master. However, I have the luxury to appreciate it.

The real struggle is finding a place in life between the spectrum of art and business. The key that I have found is the see the spectrum, appreciate it, and adjust the career to find balance, learn what you can, and move on.

My hope is to retire focusing 75% art and 25% engineering, and not worry about the business side. For instance, I have built a programming language for board games: http://www.adama-lang.org/

The key thing that I am focused on is how I think about success, and my #1 metric is whether or not I enjoy working on it.

> The real struggle is finding a place in life between the spectrum of art and business.

Well said. In my adolescence I was all the way on the "art" side, and as I grew older, at some points I was forced to be all the way on the "business" side, just to survive.

Along the way, there was a break in routine, and I was unemployed for a good part of a year. During that time, I naturally pursued "the art of code", as you put it - creating all kinds of software for fun, with no business goals whatsoever.

It was handcrafted code, patiently and lovingly written, that aimed for simplicity and my own aesthetic. My "production routine" became a more organic creative process. I wrote what I felt like, when I felt like it.

Then, by chance, one of the first open-source libraries I wrote became somewhat popular. It led to a trickle, then a stream of clients. Somehow I had lucked out in finding a niche, where people appreciated my craft.

A decade later, I'm still riding that wave - blessed to have a life with a sensible balance of art and business. Now that I have better financial security, I want to shift the balance back to where I came from, to bring the focus back to "art" - and at the same time, continue to flourish on the business side.

We don't universally praise hand-crafted objects in the real world. We only praise it in situations where the resulting object is significantly aesthetically or functionally unique. In all other cases hand crafting is absolutely considered a quaint curiosity. A good way of thinking of this:

* Mass produced bread <- cost effective product, heavy use of machinery and tooling

* Small local bakery <- higher quality product, still use plenty of professional tooling to make it cost effective

* Making your own bread at home with store bought flour <- Makes use of prepackaged assets to enable a creative experiment

* Making your own bread with wheat you grew in your backyard and hand shaped stone tools <- quaint curiosity

I agree 100%. I see many comments here critiquing the fact that this type of programming does not scale. Modern programming methodologies and this low-level hobby programming can coexist in the world.

Carpenters still use harvested, dried, milled lumber. Chefs still use harvested, dried, milled flour.

Frameworks are tools and building blocks like this, but for software. Not using them is not like an artisan carpenter using lumber from the store. It’s like a carpenter making their own boards, or a chef making her own flour. It is not really relevant to efficient, performant software, it is more like an art for the sake of it.

Libraries are closer to raw (but still refined) materials than frameworks. Frameworks impose structure on users, libraries ask users to plug them in where appropriate.

> It is not really relevant to efficient, performant software, it is more like an art for the sake of it.

This statement sort of presumes frameworks are a necessary prerequisite to software, which isn't the case.

> Frameworks are tools and building blocks

Tools, maybe, but I have yet to see anything that calls itself a "framework" (i.e. Spring, Angular, Django, Salesforce) that doesn't a) bloat the hell out of the binary, b) use more memory than it can possibly justify, c) create impossible-to-diagnose problems, d) not actually provide anything except overhead.

The best framework I've used is probably MonoGame. It abstracts away accelerated 2D graphics across multiple platforms, asset loading, and input handling, among a few other things. You write your game not against DirectX, but against the concepts it introduces. Unlike modern ideas of frameworks, it doesn't preach to you that you need to name things certain ways, or impose other slightly-pedantic notions on you.

Instead, it's focused on getting out of your way. Most other frameworks seem to love getting in your way, because they see themselves as so important.

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