Hacker News Reader

Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

> Would you trust a music notation program developed by a non-musician? A Photoshop clone written by someone who has never used Photoshop professionally?

Wouldn't a fresh look at things, essentially a "clean room" implementation offer the possibility of a novel approach to a thing or two, as opposed to making the same tool, just different?

But overall the idea of matching one's ambitions (project scope) to one's abilities (including domain knowledge) is a good one.

Not doing that is why we get things like Kickstarter campaigns for MMO games by novice developers, which never go anywhere as projects. Of course, it's also useful to fail and be humbled with learning projects, especially when someone's money is NOT on the line. Maybe more people should explore developing something like microservices in non-prod projects to better learn their advantages and disadvantages and so on.

View on HN

I think a lot of it is hubris; they've solved some things in domains they weren't familiar with, so they think they can do it again. I mean some hubris is fine, but "I will change the world with this" is probably a bit misguided in a lot of situations.

I mean working as a consultant I've worked in industries like public transit, finance, energy, postal etc, but nowhere did I think I understood enough to fix the whole thing. Actually working in those industries makes you appreciate the scale and scope of them, and that unless you end up at C-level, anything you do will probably only affect a small aspect of the whole construction.

And that's just fine, do what you can and you'll make it to retirement, take on more than you can chew and you'll end up overworked, disillusioned, or fired.

Not sure how you define "musician". There is a person who has gone to school as a musician, who works professionally, or who teaches music in school (an elementary school music teacher has a remarkable breadth of skill and knowledge.) Then there's the person who taught themselves to pick at a guitar who could be a rather serious amateur. (Myself I'd say I'm not because after trying to get better at singing I decided to sing off key because people seemed to be more entertained by it.)

If an amateur was interested enough in music to make a music notation program I'd say they're a serious amateur who has every right to try it.

I'm not too stringent with any concrete definitions here, but one of the things that came to mind when considering that possibility of a fresh look was Sonic Pi, which lets you code music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suH_goWVBeA

I'm fairly certain that it's quite different, when compared to decades if not centuries of past methods, all thanks to someone with a particular set of software development skills taking a new look at the already existing approaches and deciding to do something different.

It looks also like something that won't be used by anyone who is familiar with the existing approaches, generally happy with them and is just looking for tools that would help them with what they are already doing. The nice part is that nobody's trying to push it as a replacement for existing notation programs or DAWs.

> Wouldn't a fresh look at things, essentially a "clean room" implementation offer the possibility of a novel approach to a thing or two, as opposed to making the same tool, just different?

Yes, sometimes, but if that’s what you’re going for it’s still important that you’re solving a problem that you understand well. So maybe I would be okay with someone with limited photoshop experience making an image editor, but I hope they still have a designer/artist/etc. background.

> Yes, sometimes, but if that’s what you’re going for it’s still important that you’re solving a problem that you understand well.

I disagree. Writing a program can be a fantastic way to learn more about the problem. Of course, if you want the program to be good, you’ll probably end up needing to do some serious iteration/rewriting as you learn more.

That analogy is pretty pointless, anyhow. I trust a desk made by a carpenter not a writer. I don't expect a kitchen made by a cook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com