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Comment by phugoid | Hacker News Reader

She beautifully explained what draws people like myself to GNU/Linux. I have tried to convey some of these ideas to colleagues who are serious about Windows programming, to no avail.

It's not about Microsoft either. In my industry (flight simulation) there are some machines and systems where you can go deep and acquire design-level knowledge, and other systems where you're dealing with black boxes.

Some people prefer the latter; when things go wrong, you cycle the power switch and then contact the manufacturer if the problem still exists. I think some people take comfort in the notion that they are not ultimately responsible for whether the machines work or not. Sorry if that sounds terribly arrogant.

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From time to time I have to explain to colleagues why I prefer a minimalistic approach to programming.

One analogy to cars :) ... for normal people, having automatic transmission is great ... you can drive the vehicle with only one hand, and it allows you to concentrate more on the actual driving. But race cars still have manual or semi-automatic transmissions. Thus race drivers are empowered to do neat tricks while driving ... like not changing gears while passing another car to not lose acceleration. A manual transmission is also great for off road driving. And great drivers are also good mechanics ... cars break during races, and without knowing your car, you probably won't finish.

Of course, not all of us are meant to be race drivers. But if you want to be the best you can be, taking the ease route is not the way to go.

Thing is, a race car is designed with the fact in mind that you're not going to do anything but drive when you're in the seat. If there were racing-while-talking-on-cellphones competitions, the automatic transmission would probably be a better optimization in terms of available-attention-to-performance.

Likewise, for some types of programs (extremely parallel ones, for example), you have so many high-level considerations that also thinking about the low-level implications would simply be too much. Premature optimization is just as much a drain on the programmer as the program.

> you have so many high-level considerations that also thinking about the low-level implications would simply be too much

You still have to have a high-level perspective on how things are working, because abstractions are often leaky.

For example, I don't care much about tasks related to systems administration, allowing me to concentrate on what matters to me ... for instance I don't care about the difference between Postfix and Sendmail, or the difference between Apache and Lighttpd ... I just use the one I know until I have a problem with it, but when I do have a problem I have to find ways to solve it. And some knowledge on how the protocols and processes work really help.

You don't (usually) think about your oil when you're driving, and you especially don't change your oil while driving. Just because you understand how the low level works doesn't mean you keep it loaded in your working memory simultaneously to the high-level knowledge. You change your oil when the car is parked; you optimize when you're not in the middle of writing a feature or fixing a bug.

Really? I found the article moronic. Witness:

'Linux: home-brewed, hobbyist, group-hacked. UNIX-like operating system created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds then passed around from hand to hand like so much anti-Soviet samizdat. Noncommercial, sold on the cheap mainly for the cost of the documentation, impracticable except perhaps for the thrill of actually looking at the source code and utterly useless to my life as a software engineering consultant.'

That's called "sarcasm" ;)

This /was/ written 11 years ago. The market for Linux consultants is a little different today.

11 years ago it's still naive.

1. GNU has been going for nearly a couple of decades - Linus didn't magic an OS out of thin air. The modern equivalent is the articles written about Safari that suggest Apple did the same.

2. Nor was was Linux for home brews - Red Hat, the commercial distro, had emerged as the current leader for both businesses and nerds, with Apache (written by the ASF, which still had strong commercial roots) and to a lesser extent Samba (which I guess back then was still relatively uncommercial, so I give the article that).

3. As a Linux consultant at the end of 1998, I started on 75 Australian dollars an hour, because I knew Unix despite having no access to RISC systems. Utterly useless? I think not.

Well I think it is naive, but that was the mainstream view back then, takes a long time to shift popular views of things...

lol are we the only two ppl on this article who actually know anything about computers? all the other comments seem to have been written by my mom.

did u bust a gut at all that "peeling back the layers" so she could start replacing windows with linux? AHAHAHAHAHAHA

or that crap about rom basic? PUT IN THE FUCKING LINUX FLOPPY MOM!!!

god. this fucktard is a SOFTWARE ENGINEER. plz, kill me now.

no, actually, this kind of person is why ppl who have any skills can basically say YOU'RE GONNA PAY ME THIS AND I'M GONNA DO THAT NOW GET OUT OF MY OFFICE AND DON'T BOTHER ME.

lol.

hacker news :)

A specific instance of a much more general principle. Responsibility and understanding are hard, and passing around the problem as a black-box for someone else to solve is far simpler.

The arrogance isn't yours; it is with the people who feel entitled to someone who will take their black-boxes and return a solution, and otherwise assure they are never responsible for understanding anything. The ability to have someone do this is valuable, but it is nothing that is deserved.

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