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Comment by stcroixx | Hacker News Reader

This generation seems to love rules and forcing others to bend the knee. I don't get why, but it's highly offputting.

Some of us who prefer things more buttoned-down by tooling are probably older than the generation you’re thinking of, and are mostly just sick of having to figure out which parts of Haskell some hipster has decided to try to replicate in a language that’s very bad at being Haskell (so, most languages) before we can read their code.

I’ve seen entire language ecosystems get overwhelmed by fads of this sort, and dealing with these waves of pointless trend-chasing is exhausting.

How old do you think the author is? He’s not some “new generation” dev.

For whatever reason, the current zeitgeist is all about enforcing as many things as possible via tooling versus actually learning core principles.

I think this is because all of tech seems to be culturally downstream from FAANGs who have weird problems like "we have 500 devs making multiple commits a day and we can't trust them to do anything more than close tickets." Those are wholly self-inflicted problems, but the rest of the industry laps them up as if they are the secret to being as "great" as FAANGs. Couple that with tons of people who have less than <7 YOE in tech and/or are switching into it and you see there are very real political advantages to "keeping up with best practices."

I don’t see how using tooling prevents you from learning core principles. As in, what _core_ principle am I missing on because I don’t manually indent my braces? Note that this conversation is about _style_.

The zeitgeist re style is very much “don’t fret too much about it, use an automated tool and move on”.

Compared to the flame wars of the past about tabs vs spaces and other inconsequential things we’ve come a long way, and for good.

It doesn’t. But my snark comes from the fact that we seem to talk even less than before about actual engineering and more about the tools of software.

It's your choice to talk about something else. Nobody put a gun to your head - I hope - and forced you to read this story and comment on it.

> talk even less than before about actual engineering and more about the tools

Isn't that just a consequence of how much--or little--context is shared with (or easily-communicable-to) Random Strangers On The Internet?

For example, I've got some architectural issues going on, but it's a lot of work just to summarize it in a way that doesn't require local/domain knowledge. In contrast, talking about the weather or tabs-vs-spaces doesn't need much set-up.

that's also engineering.

I suspect FAANGs got infected by these idea by hiring from more conservative institutions driven by their financial bottom-line. I've never worked at FAANGs but I've seen that arc at other companies as they scale. Practices that foster speed and innovation are supplanted by ones that favor predictability and safety.

Enforcing mundane things with tooling is 100% orthogonal to core principles of programming.

I say this with 20+ years of programming experience: a project that doesn't do that is a project run by amateurs.

> the current zeitgeist is all about enforcing as many things as possible via tooling versus actually learning core principles.

That argument doesn't make much sense IMHO. By enforcing as many things as possible using some tooling we now do have more time to actually learn "core principles" instead of figuring how to configure/use/... $IDE/$EDITOR/$TOOL/$COMPILER/$OS to get comparable results (or anything to build at all).

scale means making the problems faced by 20% of your community a problem for all of your community

I think there's been a deskilling over the past decade and a bit.

Last job we were having trouble communicating and collaborating with some acquired teams, and I figured something out that helped a little - a culinary analogy - my team knew how to cook, let's not aggrandize ourselves too much but say we were at least short order cooks at the diner, while these new teams were McDonalds' workers. McDonald's workers aren't all idiots or lacking work ethic, but they know how to follow the laid down McDonald's burger production processes, not how to cook.

So there's gonna be a desire for McDonald's processes.

Ah yes they old "my generation is the best generation" cliche.

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