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Comment by davidp | Hacker News Reader

> we are not the recipe writers we were 20 years ago - that instead we are "abstractioners"

> we have to know far more than just the basic consturcts [sic] of the language and things like IO

Did anyone else find these annoying? I recall building a great deal of abstraction into my systems 20 years ago, and we certainly used frameworks at various layers of the system. We had to know far more than basic language constructs and IO.

Today's systems and frameworks are more available (open-source) and differently targeted (e.g. cloud-scale problems), but they're still just building abstractions on what came before, just like us old fogies were doing 20 years ago. The problems and solutions are not qualitatively different -- they just have different scale and connectivity.

All that said, Light Table seems pretty cool. But it's not evidence of deeper insight than what came before.

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Yes, I found that annoying. But it's not uncommon when reading stuff written by programmers who make extensive use of JavaScript. For whatever reason it seems to have attracted people who don't have much breadth or depth of programming experience yet at the same time like to make grand statements.

It's interesting that the author, who is speaking about things that were happening 20 years ago, graduated from college in 2008 (http://www.chris-granger.com/resume/) and thus 20 years ago he was likely a very small child.

This combination of lack of depth and yet grandeur is seen in other projects and is annoying because it means that one is forced to wade through a lot of noise to understand projects like nodejs, couchdb, etc. And it does the people who write like that a disservice. Rather then overselling their weak knowledge they should point out the cool stuff in what they are doing and let that speak for itself. It's counterproductive to pretend to be smarter than you are.

I wouldn't necessarily pinpoint the Javascript community, but yes, I would agree that there does seem to be an awful lot of really young and frankly inexperienced developers who seem to have ridiculous delusions of grandeur and are completely ignorant of the rich history of brilliant and accomplished people who have explored the problem spaces they are also exploring.

I blame the whole Silicon Valley "10x hacker" mentality. There's a whole lot of young and frankly pretty mediocre developers strutting around thinking that because they (a) live in the valley and (b) built shittytodoapp.io they're at the same level as Knuth.

You are correct that I should not claim that the entire JavaScript community is like that, but that's where I've seen the most prevalent delusions of grandeur problem.

You don't realize the irony in what you said! You complain about JavaScript developers making grand statements and you are making a grand statement about ALL JavaScript developer!

tsk tsk tsk

A sweeping generalization is not the same as a grand statement.

I actually attended the talk this is from, the concept of recipe writers vs abstractioners is not aimed at the actual developers but at the tools and how they are developed. His idea is that the tools should be built around aiding developers in their need to abstract the data (Bret Victor talked a lot about this as well).

Yeah, I was surprised about how big a deal he was making of 'abstractions'. I genuinely can't think of a single real-world developer tool that did not have support for it.

Even UML had support for PSM, PIM, etc.

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