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Comment by karlshea | Hacker News Reader

I also like "all web development is basically fancy string concatenation", and as a web dev I feel seen.

George Hotz said something once that most modern developer jobs are depressing because you're not doing any actual programming. I.e. you're not given a problem to solve with code, you're just taping together frameworks and pieces of code that someone else wrote to order. It's a bit like studying to be a chef for five years and then having to put together one of five types of burgers.

Like everything Hotz says it's spiced up of course, but there's a kernel of truth to it.

I love George, but he's a bit of a reactionary to a fault and this anecdote is a perfect example. A person with deep knowledge and thoughtfulness will make almost the exact same point with much more nuance, aka Jim Keller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=1363s

The choice quote in contrast to Hotz is "executing recipes is unbelievably efficient -- if it's what you want to do"

There's definitely an assumption by Hotz that programming and solving "real" problems is what everyone should aspire to, and that anything else is just meaningless. Like anything in life, what's meaningful is of course completely subjective, all the way from some people actually finding it fulfilling to others just not being interested in putting in that much effort into their career and preferring to do other things with their time.

The irony of this point is if you ever watch a livestream from Hotz, he is, at an amazing level, literally taping together frameworks and systems to graduate to a point where he can begin to express solutions to a real problem. It's one of his great strengths -- nothing cannot be accomplished through hours dedicated to a problem with the extant tools we have. If he wants to impugn the flawed systems we have at our disposal it's just because nothing exists that is in congruity with what is happening in his head.

He is, however he may dislike it, good at taping together frameworks and stands as a success case for the systems he might look down on.

Making crud apps feels like I'm doing a data entry job

I've for sure felt this. I'm impedance-matching rather than making things that work.

It's almost like "a series of tubes" that do nothing more than squirt text around.

"U+1F346 is an eggplant" and other oddities from the tubes we build modern society on

String concatenation has its own quirks & pitfalls of course.

Pretty much. Many frameworks exist to make it safe.

It may optimize down to string concatenation, or better yet streaming output, but you really shouldn't be doing that concatenation directly. https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2008/06/data-in-garbage-out....

and file access

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