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Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

There is only a limited amount of time in life. It matters on what you spend it. Given that the way programming in industry is done is generally fucked up, working super hard at becoming super fast at doing that brand of programming can be a waste of time. Of course that depends on what your goals are.

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Interesting POV. Can you elaborate on an alternative to the way of industry programming? Or more simply, list some of the ways in which industry brand programming is flawed?

Not the poster, but IMO we are craftspeople being made to work like assembly line workers.

I would argue that assembly line workers were once craftspeople.

Craftsmanship still exists, but it’s specialized and focused on products that can demand the higher price.

Is this not the same with software?

CRUD work is almost infinite and demands higher output at the expense of quality.

Contrast that with unique OSS projects, and defining product features.

For starters, even super big companies like Apple don't have any formal semantics for their APIs.

Of course there is a reason for that, it is just too hard with current tools for formal mathematics to achieve anything of the scale Apple needs.

So what will you spend your time on? Learn how to super fast crank out SwiftUI apps? Or solve the problem of doing formal mathematics properly so that companies can actually use it?

SwiftUI is pretty buggy still, by the way. Given that Apple controls its entire stack, why is that? Exactly, because they are following industry best practices, which are just not very good. Becoming super productive under these circumstances just means digging yourself deep into a local optimum that is not very good globally.

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