> I myself am a print debugger
In Rust, everyone is a print debugger. The only thing that really goes wrong in normal code (once it compiles) is "why is this value not what I expect?". Dropping down into GDB is way overkill.
1,396 karma · joined January 23, 2014
In Rust, everyone is a print debugger. The only thing that really goes wrong in normal code (once it compiles) is "why is this value not what I expect?". Dropping down into GDB is way overkill.
The 2008 crash called for a massive reassessment of the political and cultural status of economics. It required honest economists to recognize their profession not as a neutral description of the world but as a tool for the powerful to exercise dominion over the rest of us. But "cognitive dissonance doesn't work like that", especially when doing so would mean giving up prestige, lucrative consulting opportunities, the ear of the government. For some reason, those other social sciences don't seem to get invited to nearly such lavish parties...
Of course, many people within and without the profession have been making this argument for decades, since way before 2008. But funny thing, the way power works is - those sort of people are never listened to. Why would that change now?
Edit: For a nice overview of these arguments I recommend the book "Economists and the Powerful" from 2012.
I smiled when reading this post because I absolutely recognize the euphoria of carrying out a world-changing refactor and having it work first time. If this is what the future of backend development feels like, sign me up!
The RethinkDB retrospective[0] contains a lot of insight into how MongoDB has succeeded despite being vastly inferior on a technical level back when it first launched. I have to admit them a certain respect for executing their strategy so successfully.
Choice quote:
Every time MongoDB shipped a new release and people congratulated them on making improvements, I felt pangs of resentment. They’d announce they fixed the BKL, but really they’d get the granularity level down from a database to a collection. They’d add more operations, but instead of a composable interface that fits with the rest of the system, they’d simply bolt on one-off commands. They’d make sharding improvements, but it was obvious they were unwilling or unable to make even rudimentary data consistency guarantees.
But over time I learned to appreciate the wisdom of the crowds. MongoDB turned regular developers into heroes when people needed it, not years after the fact. It made data storage fast, and let people ship products quickly. And over time, MongoDB grew up. One by one, they fixed the issues with the architecture, and now it is an excellent product. It may not be as beautiful as we would have wanted, but it does the job, and it does it well.
[0] http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html
Always enjoyed this Churchill quote - from 1909!
Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived.
"Ask yourself why we are trying to plug defects with language features. The answer ought to be obvious. We are trying to plug these defects because these defects happen too often.
Now, ask yourself why these defects happen too often. If your answer is that our languages don’t prevent them, then I strongly suggest that you quit your job and never think about being a programmer again; because defects are never the fault of our languages. Defects are the fault of programmers. It is programmers who create defects – not languages."
Arrgh! Until we get out of this ridiculous, macho, victim-blaming mindset, software development will be stuck in the relative dark ages. More, better, safer languages, please!
[0] http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/01/11/TheDarkPath....
Most developers (workers in general) at worst are merely pointless. I think you could easily make the argument that working in banking (/oil/marketing/think tanks/...) is actively harmful and that the smarter you are, the more damage you can do.
There is no iron law that says that just because you turn up on time, work hard and internalize your organization's goals, that the world wouldn't be a better place if you had just stayed in bed.
A random selection from memory:
* Emulator and debugger for a particular embedded hardware (MSP430)
* Website that scraped Rosetta Code and displayed it in a less-annoying form
* Genetic algorithm for graph problems
* Nand2Tetris course
* Two weeks trying and mostly failing to learn Haskell (took me another year to really 'get' it)
* All sorts of other fun/dumb stuff. Boggle solver! Endless project Euler problems! Super Meat Boy!I was a miserable PhD student, playing around with poor-quality datasets, battling office politics and learning a bit of Python on the side. Saw Recurse Center as an opportunity to see if I might fit in with a techy crowd and perhaps provide some new inspiration.
Went, loved every minute, met wonderful people, learned loads, had a blast. Got home, quit my PhD, quickly landed a developer job and haven't looked back since. My only regret is not doing so sooner.
My story is not unusual. Apply to Recurse Center!