Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

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I know a startup that hired a Marxist-collective group of programmers. I was told this story years ago, and they were acquired, so I’ll just name the firm - “White Ops”. This story is so absurd that I’m naming the firm in hopes someone can verify the accuracy of this, although I trust the person that told me the tale.

The programmers were based in Canada and only wrote in Haskell. The CTO of White Ops had apparently hired them previously as contractors at a prior company without issue.

In hindsight, it turned out the purpose of Haskell was specifically because it was very difficult to hire anyone to replace them, and they wrote in a strange manner that left even experienced Haskell developers confused, especially without their customized IDE extensions.

After a couple rounds of funding, the Marxists went on strike and demanded huge amounts of equity from White Ops to continue working. Ultimately the company wound up rewriting everything in a more popular language than acquiesce to their demands. I heard the Marxist group also had tons of drama because the leader made everyone live onsite in shared housing.

You can do that in almost any language, though.

There was a furry who worked as a web developer for a small firm. He had built their back-end runtime in MUCK scripting language. (A MUCK is like a MUD, but without the statistics and stuff, so it's much less a role-playing game than it is simply role-playing.) Eventually he was fired, probably because he spent more time pretending to be a highly sexualized female fox on MUCKs than doing his job, but the back end to all their web apps was written in MUCK code -- and few non-furries even knew what a MUCK was let alone how to program one. So the befuddled engineers who remained had to figure out how to modify the code without their vulpine-in-his-own-mind former colleague.

They uh, also didn't notice the backdoor he put into the web server that allowed him to spy on their activities, even though he was gone from the company...

I can't even. Did they use the one that's basically Forth with a string stack (No, not Postscript, Forth with a string stack) or the one that's basically m4 (the higher level of the two sendmail scripting languages) implemented in Forth with a string stack?

I think they used MPI (the m4-like one) because it is much easier to retrofit as a sort of templating language for use in web pages back in the 90s when that was a thing, as opposed to the modern practice of maintaining an entire parallel-universe DOM which is then transformed into the real DOM. MUF (the Forth-like one) was a bit too low-level for the application, though I do seem to recall a story this same furry wrote in which a fantasy CPU is mentioned that runs MUF natively, like a Lisp machine but for furry roleplay environments. I won't get into the uses to which it was put.

You described every enterprise Java project developed by contractors except that it can’t be rewritten because Java is THE enterprise language.

SOLID and a dozen of DPs and you get there pretty fast. Then you rewrite by another team with their interpretation of SOLID and another dozen of "better suited" DPs and you get there again. On 3rd iteration you just buy something as a service that covers 80% of your needs and consider the rest 20% non-essential business. And life is finally good.

Nah, they get rewritten back and forth between Java and .NET, with a little bit of C++ (actually COM) every now and then. :)

> I know a startup that hired a Marxist-collective group of programmers

I think i know these guys! Their names are Karl, Vlad, and Fred, right? Last I heard they founded the International Common-Lisp Party

This story is a fabrication. Please tell John that we're worried about him.

John is one of the richest people on earth! True story

In what way was the group "Marxist"? Are you trying to say they hired the entirety of a workers co-op?

I was told they are self-described Marxists. I am not an expert in the finer points of communist philosophy but I assume this means they believed in the labor theory of value and the class struggle.

I loved every word of that!

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