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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Much love and respect to what you're doing and your opinion - I've followed along plenty on your friday threads.

But the problem with this attitude is having everyone write in assembly or C means we'd never get anything done. Re-Inventing the wheel is fun (sometimes), but it's not efficient. Stitching together libraries correctly is still difficult enough that very few people can be competent software architects.

I'd agree that people need to understand they're standing on the shoulders of giants, and I have seen a marked decrease in that knowledge/attitude among younger programmers. But if I had to build some of the things I've worked on without anyone else's great code, I'd be miserable.

But the problem with this attitude is having everyone write in assembly or C means we'd never get anything done. Re-Inventing the wheel is fun (sometimes), but it's not efficient. Stitching together libraries correctly is still difficult enough that very few people can be competent software architects.

My rant isn't so much "Everyone needs to write everything in assembly/C" as "Everyone, at some time, needs to have written something in assembly/C".

I sure as shit am not re-inventing the wheel constantly in my day job. I'm stitching together libraries for efficiency's sake, same as everyone else. But having at one point made my own wheel, even if not a particularly good one, I understand you aren't supposed to use a wheel flat on it's side. Or try to put a flat edge on it. Which keeps me from doing pants-on-head retarded things with other people's wheels.

But like... there are lots of people who are value-positive programmers in today's environment who would never be willing or even able to do anything worth doing in assembly. I bet you're much better than they are -- you're a grandmaster while they're merely competent -- but surely you agree they're still worthwhile to employ, even if only so they can do the dumb grungy projects on which your talents would be wasted. It feels like you are picturing the counterfactual universe as one in which everyone who was currently employed as a software engineer had your talents and depth of expertise -- but I think the more likely alternative is one in which almost no one can live up to your standards, so almost no one writes software, almost nothing gets built, and our society doesn't get to have nice things.

I'm sorry you have to work with them, though. The depth of conviction that makes great programmers great also means it is torture for them to be forced to collaborate with relatively shitty programmers.

torture for them to be forced to collaborate with relatively shitty programmers

This is mostly because we want them to notice our brilliant optimizations and beautiful abstractions in PR review, and decorate our PR with :thumbsup: and :+100: and :sunglasses: emojis. But it all just goes past them and they Approve without comment.