JWZ: that "duct tape" silliness | Hacker News Reader

JWZ: that "duct tape" silliness

jwz.livejournal.com

186 pointsallenbrunson24 comments

and yet he doesn't fetishize the latest fads

If I were to write a blog post about jwz, that would be the core of it. Not anything about duct tape.

Our industry is full of insecure people who grab on to the latest fashion like lemmings. Inheritance is in, then it's out. Patterns are in, then they're out. SQL databases are in, then they're out. jwz's writing has, in a small way, contributed to my mental liberation from software industry group think.

Not that he's unique, but he's in the clear thinking minority and he's a good writer.

Linus Torvalds is also a good example. See any thread where someone insists he should have used C++ or a microkernel.

I completely agree. This is a blog post I wrote on the subject: http://robotr.tumblr.com/post/189911981/following-trends-wha... (but you do a great work telling this briefly)

Most languages worth learning expand your mind. They really do.

Lisp lets you to see your source in different light. Haskell makes you rethink expressions. C lets you know how it all works under the hood. Factor makes you think both directions.

There are also languages that set the bar high for you. Ruby for elegance. Prototype or jquery for making complex ugly thing a paradise. Even Perl's CPAN shows you the value of cooperation and modularization.

Even bad languages teach you a lot about ugliness, bad decisions and denial.

The same can be said about quite a few frameworks or even tools. strace makes programs transparent, for example, while tcpdump makes you see, you realize you were blind.

As for math and algorithms, you suddently know enough of them, they're pretty finite.

I don't agree.

Imagine two paths for a developer:

- learn a lot of languages, like everyone else does... a lot of this learning will be useless with time

- learn, for example, a lot about computer vision... the road for this is not "pretty finite" and as you learn more about this, you can work on more and more impressive projects every time (making your value bigger)

This is how I see it, and I don't think the first path is worthwhile. (Yes, I learned a lot of languages and frameworks too... but at a point I started asking to myself: why care about most of it? the real stuff is not this)

I think the Linus Torvalds example was a good one. Or John Carmack. Do you see them talking about a lot of languages and frameworks or do you see them learning and doing new stuff?

I am pretty sure that isn't really an example of "damning with faint praise" - it is clear to anyone that the use of the "duct tape" phrase was dramatic, considering he then goes to describe jwz as being one of those people that just gets out of bed looking good etc... (NOT faint praise !)

That would be "yeah, jwz did an OK job on netscape" etc..

It definitely struck me as faint praise. It sounds like he's talking about the village handyman who lives in the granny shack behind Jake Doe's place and whom no one is quite sure where he came from.

I still can't see that in it (I guess I know who jwz is, and know who joel is, and what he has said about jwz in the past and that colours it for me, but I am POSITIVE that was not the intent).

It's not that everyone doesn't love and appreciate the village handyman. They really like having him around. They just don't respect him very much.

Reading between the lines of Joels original article, I must say I am a bit delighted to understand to that even Joel got "frigtards" into his team (I had to look up this term in a dictionary - very funny ;o). Despite all guerilla guides on interviewing and telephone screens etc. pp.

In preparation for my last interview I read a lot in Joels blog and found it very helpful. But in the end, the guy we hired IS a frigtard. The only difference to Joels description is, that he usually comes with a cup of tea into my office, not coffee. But the focus on useless, time consuming, elaborate bs is remarkable.

Just a side remark. And my fault of course.

A friend of mine commented today had HN a "trending topics" list, duct tape would be heading it for the last couple days...

I'm glad JWZ commented on Joel's essay. Joel's work is of varying quality and yet he gathered quite a following of people who accept whatever he says without criticism.

Fortunately, JWZ has way more credibility for anyone who has actually looked at code.

The whole article was a back-handed compliment. The funniest part, though, is that Joel doesn't even seem to know it.

This whole duct tape programmer thing seems like a huge - and obviously working - marking tactic in order to sell that book. I mean, how often have we seen this story on hackernews since Joel posted the original article?

I have to say: Well done, and everyone that blogs about it helps to spread the word about the book.

Now that thousands of (intelligent) people have wasted hours discussing Joel's insane article, can we all just move on? Please stop posting any more of the duct tape articles.

I disagree with that, because this is "the duct tape programmer" himself, having a say in the matter.

His say basically is that we should all stop talking about programming and actually program things, because we'll all learn a lot more about what actually works in practice rather than what we think might work.

This is incredibly good advice which I can't seem to follow myself. I'm on HN during the workday instead of getting my damn CSS layouts to resize correctly, after all.

You ever look at jwz's markup or CSS? He's solved that problem by bypassing it entirely. Go work on something fun.

His pages also tend to be butt-ugly. ;-) I get paid to make things pretty, or rather to take the pretty designs that interaction/visual designers come up with and make them actually work, across all browsers, maintainably, with a minimum number of bytes.

In return, when I'm not wrestling with CSS I can play with massive quantities of data and a few zillion machines. Not a bad trade-off IMHO.

In return when JWZ is finished hacking he hangs in his own nightclub. Not a bad trade-of IMHO ;)

cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/

I think Joel was also plugging a book in that post. Gee ... look at all the traffic he generated. (yes I ordered it and it arrived today)

for a long while i thought jwz was female. just thought i'd throw that out there. (the "he" pronouns here and in other articles set me right. not sure how i came to my previous conclusion or why it lasted so long)

I don't think it is weird to assume Jamie is a female name.

I read this interview of JWZ by Peter Siebel, joel missed something, but there are few thing in interview which i couldn't understand or better say trying to understand

This is my post regarding that http://weddew.com/blog/2009/09/productivity/why-so-much-rush...

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