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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

Imo, this is like saying "I judge a carpenter based on how straight they can cut a piece of plywood." Or like saying "I judge an artist on how accurately they can draw a circle by hand."

I mean that's certainly one way of looking at it, and both can be impressive technical feats. But most people judge carpenters and artists on their end products, their overall vision, their motifs, their philosophy, and so on. On the other hand, as a trained logician, I definitely see proofs (which, by the Curry–Howard isomorphism, are computer programs) have some degree of beauty-within-themselves, but that's quite hard to achieve. Not everyone is a Gödel, after all.

I also think programming languages, despite being Turing complete (which is frankly not saying much), are far too limiting to truly construct magnificent things with.

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No, it's more like saying "I judge an artist on my terms regardless of how well they sell on the market".

> artists on their end products, their overall vision, their motifs, their philosophy, and so on

The main output of programmer's work is their understanding of the system they work with, the rest comes from that. Behind the code there's its author's intention, vision, their tastes, philosophy and experience that makes them tackle problems in specific ways. Code review is, aside of quality assurance, mostly about communication between people, convincing them to your ways of doing things (or getting convinced by others) and communicating needs. It's what keeps projects running and what makes people improve their skills.

You don't need to see magnificence in code to realize that there's more to it than just the syntax tree to compile.

> No, it's more like saying "I judge an artist on my terms regardless of how well they sell on the market".

I feel like I need to push back here, because some of the best programmers around: Carmack, Torvalds, Johnathan Blow, even folks that make programming languages like K&R, Rob Pike, etc. are judged on their respective end products, not on minutia found in code reviews. For example, if I asked you "why do you think Stroustrup is a good programmer?"—you wouldn't cite some obscure optimization he came up with, but would rather talk about his overall vision for C++, his ideas of evolving C, his staunch anti-GC takes over the years (and their justification), etc.

You're contradicting yourself. First you say that they're judged on the end product, then you mention things that are very clearly not end products but thoughts and visions behind them that only lead to end products.

Frankly, I have no real idea of how good Carmack, Torvalds or Blow are as programmers, I have never worked with them so I don't really have a way to tell (even though I do contribute to Linux and I've seen some of their code). They're likely past a certain above-average threshold, but they haven't got famous for their programming skills.

That said, if you think Torvalds isn't being judged on "minutia found in code reviews", I'm not sure your take is very serious in the first place - that's the main thing he was being judged on for decades now :)

> You're contradicting yourself

How?

> you mention things that are very clearly not end products but thoughts and visions behind them that only lead to end products

Thoughts and visions are much more closely intertwined with end products (in fact, likely supercede them) than some random code review is, so I'm not seeing where the contradiction lies.

> that's the main thing he was being judged on for decades now

Linus hasn't written any code[1] in at least half a decade+. To argue that he's being judged on his code misunderstands why Linux became so popular to begin with.

[1] https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/07/03/2133201/linus-torv...

Either I'm bad at communicating today or you're bad at reading, because you're now using my points, so I'm not sure what to make out of it. Let me repeat myself then:

> Code review is (...) mostly about communication between people, convincing them to your ways of doing things (or getting convinced by others) and communicating needs. It's what keeps projects running and what makes people improve their skills.

The way he does that is exactly what most news stories about Torvalds have been focusing on for many years now. In practice, unless you run a project alone, code review is where thoughts and visions surface up the most. Or, well, should be - not everyone is good at it.

(that said, even though my point is that's he's obviously not being judged on his code, you can easily find code that he wrote as late as this month, so your statement is clearly wrong even if that doesn't really influence the discussion here - code review is still the vast majority of his job, just like he stated there under your link)

> Either I'm bad at communicating today or you're bad at reading

Could be both :)

The way I look at it is like this, and you could call this my thesis: I do not categorically think that code in itself is primarily relevant to us looking at a "software engineer" and saying "wow, she's good." The product (the Linux kernel, in Torvalds' case) is, on the other hand, what actually matters. I think we're getting caught up on the idea of a code review; a code review can serve many purposes, as a code review is basically just people talking about the code, the product, their feelings, and so on. Sure, sometimes it's like "this `i` should be a `j`", but other times it's "this should serve feature X, not feature Y."

Overall, I don't think Torvalds is judged by his code quality. And the snippet I cited is the man himself saying "I don't write code anymore" so I took that at face value, even though my conviction stands wether or not he actually does still write code. I don't think anyone actually cared that much about his code quality (maybe with the caveat that the kernel didn't crash).

PS: I could be totally wrong, and this is an interesting & stimulating conversation, regardless.

What I'm trying to get at is more like: I judge a carpenter based on how beautiful, minimal, and functional he makes a chest of drawers, not based on how quickly he can go to market with particle board and glue."

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