3 karma · joined June 8, 2022
That's like saying suturing dexterity does not a good surgeon make. Anything that reduces cognitive friction, including the ease with which keystrokes go from your brain to the screen, makes you a better dev.
I'd say vim wins the fewest-keystrokes battle. But emacs wins the war because it leads you to lisp, and lisp makes you a better programmer.
For computing history, Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond.
For inspirational American stories, David McCullough (1933-2022) is peerless. The Wright Brothers nearly brought me to tears.
This puts Stallman in a pretty massive demographic, one that includes the clergy, public school teachers, and professional baduk players.
Of course the vast majority of devs use whatever suits them, GUI or not.
And you couldn't have picked an editor with a worse GUI story.
As a broke college student, I revelled in free-as-in-beer Linux, emacs, R, and LaTeX. Now that I'm on the other side, I can't help but regret Torvalds and Stallman giving away the farm (yes, I'm inclined to take not give). As much as we hated Microsoft in the 90s, it was an economy in which a coder's skill translated directly into shrink-wrapped profits. Now we're all coding in service to high-latency cloud crap and selling customer data.
easy for software to commoditize hardware... hard for hardware to commoditize software. (Spolsky 2002)
Linus effectively killed the golden goose of writing OSs, a super-difficult task that deservedly propelled Gates and Allen to the stars.
All it takes is a college kid and a laptop to ship software. I wouldn't know where to start building and shipping chips and circuit boards. And that's why Azure, not Office, is where Microsoft's placing its bets.
Nearly everything we do has no near- or long-term effect. I'm a bicyclist, but also an organism whose time-distance feedback loop is jarred by a sudden obstructionist anomaly.
No one's calibrating their prototype roll-out according to how big or small they think they're going to be. That'd be a bit like turning down a soap commercial because it'll be embarrassing when you join the MCU, although to be fair, an unknown Gwyneth Paltrow did turn down "Cool as Ice" (1991).
As painful as Microsoft's dominance was, the era of shrinked-wrapped cdroms represented a more honest time when what you got was commensurate to what you paid. Now the only game in town is dangling the carrot and selling your customers' info to advertisers.
While not every transaction is zero-sum, nearly all those being shoved in our faces daily are.
The irony is most programmers are aware their software is a solution looking for a problem, and rely on their own salespeople to win the game they despise. It's not hypocrisy if we do it.
Start with getting an entry-level job doing C++, which 1. financially incentivizes, and 2. gives you something concrete to work off of. I am an experienced programmer.
Yeah, we hate that. On the one hand, it's impossible to build off a shaky foundation. On the other hand, software quality rarely correlates with revenue. That why we call it work?