Source
- URL: https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1411443491876458496
- Author: Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow)
- Posted: 2021-07-03 21:55:26
Thread
1/ @Jonathan_Blow
The “excuse factory” Casey discusses in this video is something I see all the time, not just about performance, but also functionality, or how many people it takes to program something. The person making the excuses …
https://x.com/cmuratori/status/1411438335931785218
2/ @Jonathan_Blow
… is pretty much always reflexively starting from the position that what they are doing must be right, and let’s come up with rationalizations why it’s right. No first-principles thinking is involved (How many instructions can the machine run per second? What is the size of …
3/ @Jonathan_Blow
… the data being loaded?) This is a big clue that, in these cases, programming is being practiced as a religion rather than a science or an art. As someone who also works hard to make things good, I also find (like Casey) that it is depressing to look around …
4/ @BuschnicK
@Jonathan_Blow
Curious why you went with science and art to characterize programming. I usually think of it rather as a craft. The scientific method is rarely required and it’s little code that aspires to be art. A lot of it is more akin to plumbing and constructing standard pieces…
5/ @Jonathan_Blow
@BuschnicK
Sounds like the programming you do is kind of boring? Maybe you could work somewhere that gives you more-interesting projects.
6/ @BuschnicK
@Jonathan_Blow
True. These days I sadly do little programming at all anymore.
But even on interesting projects I find there’s a lot of boring boilerplate that just needs to be done…
Branches: 2021-07-04-vzaramel-maybe-the-problem-here-is-that-science-and-art