Every day I learn something new… and stupid. | Hacker News Reader

Every day I learn something new… and stupid.

jwz.org

60 pointshelwr20 comments

I find it interesting that a lot of prominent and respected programmers (jwz, Linus, Dan Bernstein, Theo De Raadt) write in this negative and caustic way, and not only is it considered socially acceptable but these rants get linked to and give the writer even wider street cred.

I think this is a detriment to our community, and I say this as a reformed (or at least reforming) flamer who used to take after that style. Actually I think one of the most positive things about participating in the HN community is that toxic commenting is not rewarded nearly to the extent that it is on other forums. It's taught me to be more civil.

I've interacted with enough top programmers who are always nice to know that flaming isn't a prerequisite to getting your point across. Besides many excellent HN commenters, I think of John Resig, Shawn Hargreaves, Sanjay Ghemawat. I strive to be more like them, and less like the people who are known for their flames.

The irony is that this comment is by itself flammable-material :)

I know this is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's a huge difference between something that is constructively critical and something that is caustic.

Since I am such a seasoned flamer, allow me to demonstrate how this same comment could have been written in a much more caustic way (this will lead to even greater irony since it is arguing against flaming, but let's ignore that for the moment. :)

-- begin flagrantly caustic comment, for science --

I love how programmers fawn over these juvenile rants as some sort of geek-machismo. I guess that's what you find impressive when you're sitting in your mother's basement.

News bulletin from the Society Of Grownups And People With Girlfriends: you can make a point without using the word "stupid" or insulting anybody. Reading the likes of jwz, Linus, etc. you might be skeptical of this, but it is in fact true.

I don't get the need for harmony everywhere. We're all adults and should be able to cope with someone saying the F* word in relation to a really shitty technology.

I accepted that for HN I have to fabric soften my comments but only because of that karma thing. Without score keeping (well, at least without the negative effects of having low karma) my comments would be more colorful. They would say 100% the same but in a more entertaining way. But as that's not acceptable for this community you only get my robotic self ;)

I got a nice chuckle out of "fabric soften" -- doesn't sound robotic to me. :)

I think the problem with sharp comments is that they evoke a response of defensiveness and argumentativeness in many/most people that corrupts the actual content of the discussion. If people start being primarily concerned with winning the argument, the quality of discussion suffers. It's harder to back down from a position if a second ago you were arguing that anyone who thinks that must be an idiot of the first degree.

I'd have to disagree, there's a big difference between flaming and being to the point.

I'd rather hear or read a "It fails because X Y Z" then having to go thru a lengthy prose or statement that says "it has been incontrovertibly proven that the restrictions and performance metaphors applied to X as it cascades thru Y is causing an undesired negative effect on Z. Therefore we can only conclude it's marginally very disappointing."

The content in question is very much to the point in my opinion, some of it I consider being written in jest so how this is "negative and caustic" escapes me.

You have to be polite and well spoken or efficient and terse, you can't be both at the same time.

I think you can be polite and terse, friend.

Yes, but they usually use nicer words for that, like "succinct".

I think many programmers are angry because they have to use so obviously broken technologies that have managed to capture the mainstream by only marketing, luck, ignorance or some combination of those. I certainly weep every time I look for jobs and there are ten times more jobs for PHP/MySQL than anything else.

>I certainly weep every time I look for jobs and there are ten times more jobs for PHP/MySQL than anything else.

Think carefully about why this is so.

A "job-creating" technology is a dysfunctional technology.

Very cool: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-...

>> "Ten days to implement the lexer, parser, bytecode emitter (which I folded into the parser; required some code buffering to reorder things like the for(;;) loop head parts and body), interpreter, built-in classes, and decompiler. I had help only for jsdate.c, from Ken Smith of Netscape (who, per our over-optimistic agreement, cloned java.util.Date — Y2K bugs and all! Gosling…).

>> Sorry, not enough time for me to analyze tail position (using an attribute grammar approach: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_...). Ten days without much sleep to build JS from scratch, "make it look like Java" (I made it look like C), and smuggle in its saving graces: first class functions (closures came later but were part of the plan), Self-ish prototypes (one per instance, not many as in Self).

>> I'll do better in the next life."

I also liked jwz's response farther down to criticism about selling out: "Brendan's house and my nightclub thank us for selling out early and often."

Having never met a person this productive, could this really be possible?

My first compiler (Ur-Scheme, which compiles the subset of Scheme it's written in, and runs faster when compiled with itself than when compiled with any other Scheme compiler I could find) took me only three weeks, including the time to debug all the crashes from emitting faulty assembly code. Ten days to implement the JS interpreter seems eminently reasonable, especially if you get to use things like lex and yacc, and it isn't your first interpreter ever.

> I'm still bummed that I failed to talk you in to making #!/usr/bin/javascript work back then, because I think that we were still in the window where we had a shot at smothering Perl in the crib…

It's like catching a beautiful glimpse of a future that never was.

(I might update the last three words of that sentence if I take the time to fiddle around with Node.)

I'm not a fan of Perl, and I have in fact a great deal more experience with JavaScript, but I don't see a command-line runtime and interface being sufficient to make it prevent Perl from taking over its niche.

Yeah. Javascript is quite powerful in certain respects, and I mostly prefer its syntax, but Perl is powerful, and the Perl-dedicated are capable of cranking out seemingly miraculous marvels of text processing in the amount of time that a good Javascript programmer would spend just scratching their head at the problem. (I say this without even the merest ounce of language zealotry left in me.)

I feel similarly about vim. Not my cup of tea (I'm an emacs nut), but the dedicated can churn through text like a banshee's screech through courage.

That said, I don't really work on projects or write code that necessitates being a human m4.

Wasn't this one of the things that broke a whole bunch of twitter apps a while ago? And the reason the twitter API returns post ids as both integers _and strings_ in it's json?

(at least in Fortran you knew the variable "i" was a properly specified integer, dammit!)

How is this Java's fault again?

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