Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with the statement that clothes can be "by themselves independently are meaningless". Garments carry cultural, historical and symbolic weight even before they're combined. And fashion is hardly mainly about combining outfits.

And fashion is a lot about tradeoffs too. Not just in the production, but also in the day to day wearing and mix-and-matching part.

Meaningless in the context of an outfit - not necessarily whether the garment itself may have meaning to someone. You may surely be in possession of a couple of random trinkets of great historic significance but if you just mesh them all together into one outfit you might simply end up with a mess on your hands. A garment may well be the centerpiece of an outfit - but it is ultimately always the combination that is important.

Im sure you've seen examples of this yourself - you can absolutely sport a Ray Ban in good taste and you've almost surely seen someone believe themselves to be fashionable because they are wearing a Ray Ban.

Also, I'm not suggesting fashion as a whole is about combing outfits - merely that being able to combine varying pieces of clothing into a cohesive whole is an expression of good taste.

I think the line of thinking you want to explore has more to do with how we perceive beauty and elegance. That has been the subject of philosophers all over in our recorded history, and I doubt a single article will be able to cover this.

Christopher Alexander studied this deeply for building architecture, and his ideas had influenced many thinkers of software architecture; Alexander asserts that there is a thing to objective beauty. Alexander’s keynote to the OOPSLA conference is worth reading, as is Roy Fielding’s dissertation. The “values” mentioned in this article is organized as “architectural properties” in Fielding’s dissertation.

> what subjective combination is a software engineer deciding on that you can argue is truly a matter of taste and not just a technical decision about a trade-off.

I put down to taste many things that I believe are technical decisions about trade-offs but that I cannot absolutely verify or which I believe the trade off is so very small that it doesn't actually matter.

Funny, I think it was one of the more insightful and well put together articles on a subject that usually elicits very hand-wavy unactionable statements.

You're comparing apples and oranges. Good taste in fashion is much more subjective than in software engineering, obviously because one stays a subjective discipline while the other always ends up in formal science.

What's interesting is that software engineering starts in social science where most choices are made subconsciously or at least not discussed with other people.

Most engineers and technical persons don’t have good fashion taste, so they have a hard time understanding good taste in general.

The great majority of technical things are not cool to normal humans, they’re geeky. Programming languages are not cool. In programming one has to therefore start from “not cool” and move down the scale:

Uncool: Rust, C++, most languages

Painfully uncool: anything functional and weird. Bash, Linux, etc.

Yeah the Linux language gets most people's goats......

This comment annoyed me so much I had to get an actual keyboard to respond.

First off, the concept of "good taste" is much, much broader than only applying to clothing based fashion. You can have good taste in practically any field that involves any amount of creativity/choice: cooking, painting, writing, music, programming, video game design, etc, the list is practically infinite.

As such, the idea that most "engineers and technical persons" don't "understand good taste" is incredibly silly. It's entirely possible, perhaps even probable that the average programmer lacks good taste in terms of fashion, but that says nothing at all about good taste in other areas.

Secondly, having good taste and being able to apply it is also wildly different. I can recognize what looks good in fashion or paintings without being myself able to achieve that.

Thirdly, there's really no such thing as a "normal human". The longer you live, assuming you're willing to actually examine your experiences, the more you'll learn that the trite expression "everyone is unique" really is accurate.

Just as a semi-random example, it might be tempting to think of watching football (nfl) as "normal". According to a quick google, the average nfl game gets like 17-20million viewers, and even assuming that's accurate/all unique people/etc, it's a very large number in absolute terms but its less than 10% of the population of america.

So if you took a random group of 100 americans, something like 6-7 would have watched a football game last week[1]. Now that's still many times larger than the number of people who wrote code last week, but it's not some kind of overwhelming majority that "everyone" does.

[1] Yes these numbers are extremely imprecise, it's rhetorical

It is broader since it applies to things which can be perceived visually, but does not apply to any random creative activity. The list is finite and programming is not on it.

Furthermore, taste in one area is more likely to manifest in other areas. Somebody that has good taste in fashion would likely have good taste in interior decoration or art.

> Secondly, having good taste and being able to apply it is also wildly different. I can recognize what looks good in fashion or paintings without being myself able to achieve that.

Ok, but applying it is the interesting part.

> Thirdly, there's really no such thing as a "normal human". The longer you live, assuming you're willing to actually examine your experiences, the more you'll learn that the trite expression "everyone is unique" really is accurate.

The things that make individuals truly unique are often irrelevant in the greater scheme. One could draw a line across continents and ages to connect quite similar people.