[HN Gopher] Tribes of Programming (2017)
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Tribes of Programming (2017)
Author : myth_drannon
Score : 59 points
Date : 2020-12-28 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (josephg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (josephg.com)
| not_knuth wrote:
| Really enjoyed the article. It's well written and makes it's
| point succinctly.
|
| Though no true trichotomies exist, this one approximates the
| landscape nicely (in my opinion).
| rav wrote:
| I work at a small company on a single page webapp. Since we're
| working on a subscription-based product, we need to focus on
| fixing bugs and improving usability to make our users more
| productive and more happy. This should place us in firmly the
| third camp of pragmatic professional software engineers. But I
| don't agree with the trichotomy outlined in the article.
|
| We spend plenty of time and effort doing "programming as hardware
| hacking" to implement a backend that can process our customers'
| data orders of magnitude faster than our closest competitors:
| This allows our customers to obtain analysis results in
| minutes/hours instead of days/weeks. We didn't get there with the
| third-camp sentiment that "The program only has to be fast enough
| for the users" - if we did, we wouldn't be leaders of the (niche)
| industry that our customers operate within.
|
| Then again, we spend plenty of time doing "programming as applied
| mathematics". Our software inherently consists of a lot of
| geometric algorithms. To give a recent example, a couple
| colleagues and I spent a couple days last month to fix a buggy
| geometric primitive: Given an almost-simple polygon, which is
| made by joining the endpoints of a polyline without self-
| intersections with a straight edge, compute its area. We had a
| seemingly-correct, but complicated and evidently buggy,
| implementation that needed to be used in a new user-facing
| feature (contour-line simplification). After several whiteboard
| sessions and do-overs, we found a simple formulation of the
| problem that admitted a simple and obviously correct
| implementation. The buggy area computation didn't cause any
| crashes or other obstructions to the user, but it created results
| that looked aesthetically unpleasing (because the lines were
| poorly simplified).
| dgb23 wrote:
| I'm ultimately in camp three, trying my best to learn from camp
| one, adhering to camp two when needed.
| kuharich wrote:
| Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20882783
| dexen wrote:
| Should I be worried that I identify with each and every of those
| three camps?
|
| Depending on the project at hand - and perhaps also depending on
| the day - I am any one of the three?
|
| My one extra nuance would be the "less is more" attitude rooted
| in UNIX tradition.
| aphextron wrote:
| What about the "This is all I'm good at, and I just do it to get
| paid" tribe?
| pklausler wrote:
| It's a subset of the "This is all I do, and I just do it to get
| paid" tribe.
| quitterx wrote:
| I'm a whore. I write code for money.
|
| I would say everyone I know in big tech fits into this camp.
| kelvin0 wrote:
| A whore? In the sense of prostitution? Time for money? Or money
| at the cost of your integrity? Real curious.
| Bekwnn wrote:
| The author probably underestimates the limitations of Unity,
| especially earlier versions from back when The Witness was made.
| It would kind of be surprising if all the things in that game
| were possible to do with reasonable performance in Unity back
| then, especially without paying ~50k+ for source access.
|
| It feels like the article almost but doesn't quite touch on it:
| there's people firmly in multiple camps, and gamedev tends to be
| camp 3, but also very often camp 2 and/or camp 1.
|
| To get AAA or even AA games running requires a lot of dogma from
| camp 2. Graphics programming, procedural generation, and gameplay
| systems complex enough to produce emergent gameplay would be camp
| 1 from the sounds of it.
|
| I feel my feet firmly stuck in all 3, at any rate.
| neurobashing wrote:
| I'm just skilled labor.
|
| I'm a milling machine operator, except instead of a CNC machine
| making, idk, table legs, I'm writing a thing to filter some
| database result based on some user input from a web page.
|
| I am not doing poetry or making hardware dance, I am not doing
| mathematics (directly anyway). This is a trade. I'm building the
| small pieces of the bigger things our culture either needs, or
| sometimes just wants. It's my job and I'm good enough at it that
| I've gone from almost literal apprentice to lead. I'll work hard,
| then retire to a farm and never touch another keyboard again.
|
| (jk how else would I do my taxes, I'm not a luddite)
|
| So that's whatever "tribe" I am, I guess.
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