Tangram Vision: Why We're Choosing Rust as a Startup

medium.com

18 points·bminortx··2 comments

> I am not a good programmer. To be clear, I’m not… bad. I can pass a coding interview. I’ve handcrafted huge repositories spanning multiple languages and machines, and I’m pretty proud of them. But wow, have I also written some bad code. Things that I’ll see a year later, whisper “What idiot did this?”, and slowly realize, through the fog of git commits, that I was that idiot.

This argument is circular logic because everyone has written bad code at some point in their life. Assuming that the author has not suffered any form of death between birth and now, and assuming that when he was born he had no knowledge of programming, by intermediate value theorem of course he has written bad code.

This is a deliberately obtuse reading of the author's intent. Read further:

> And not only have I written bad code. My friends have written bad code. My colleagues have written bad code. Our mentors have written bad code. The code that all of our code depends on was written by someone who wrote bad code. Bad code is everywhere.

The author's point is not that everyone writes bad code at some point, ever, which is trivially true as you pointed out. They're saying that our code is bad now, we just don't know it yet.

I like to say: Nobody will hate my code as much as myself in 6 months.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com