I agree with your take but interestingly it seems to be both an argument for, and against, calling it a spectrum. Humans are so good at adapting/conforming/masking, and we adjust ourselves toward a common accepted way of behaving, which further confounds the difficulty in understanding the problem.
I think the "spectrum" analogy has reduced stigma overall, especially toward people with poor social skills. But it isn't always helpful.
_Clean Code_ is an extremely well-known book on programming by Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin from the 2000s. Posts about it have come up on HN as recently as this year.
Maybe it’s a sign of the times, but I’m surprised you’ve never come across it. I say this as someone who doesn’t agree with many of the suggestions.
The fact that he capitalized both Cs indicates he's talking about the book, which is famous enough that I learned about it and its influence when I was in school ~15 years ago.
GP wrote clean code (lowercase) which most people would take to mean the general practices of hygenic, well maintained code.
Clean code is over abstraction, spaghetti code. The people who are part of this cult just point to the source material and title, never critically think about why it might be bad (it’s super slow, check YouTube “clean code performance” for why) or entertain alternatives.
I was at OSU when they won the 2018 natty. They deployed the horse cops. The riot squad. Teargassed most of High st and campus. Arrested dozens. But it was legendary, and I will never forget that night and its energy.
Yep it's tough to be optimistic. I like to think about a micro-meteorite falling on my head. It's possible at any moment, and yet I always ask myself why I'm not worried about it.
The best advice that anyone can give you is to stop looking at social media, or reduce it by 90+%. The kind of "depression" or "despair" you express is a symptom of doom scrolling.
My next advice is a question - If you can't enjoy today, why do you think you would enjoy tomorrow, even if everything in life were perfect? "One day at a time" is really good advice. Do something tangible to mark your successes or failures on this one single day, and then rinse and repeat tomorrow. If you are "failing" too much, then recalibrate your expectations until you can mark several points of success, no matter how small. "I read my work email" or "I did zero youtube".
My non-expert prediction is that LLMs will ruin the youth's coding skills. Anyone in a deep dev discussion will have to have instinctual knowledge that LLMs can't teach, and their value will be apparent when non-trivial tasks arise. And remember, a micro-meteorite could fall on our heads at any time!
> movement in this country that defines itself largely by opposing what its perceived enemies support
I think that some of the more devious politicians realized that a "partitioning" of beliefs creates populations of in-groups and out-groups which are then manipulated against each other. Many "basic" facts are getting challenged just to create the controversy. Controversy reinforces tribalism, which in turn makes people more controllable.
There's probably just some ~Wordpress dev who picked from a selection of B-Roll. The CEO probably marginally understands bread and isn't a raisin french toast peanut butter freak.
I've spent probably 200 hours with MoonScript, was obsessed with it for a bit, and love it 90% of the time. The problem is that MoonScript's grammar is INCREDIBLY permissive. Common typos(often involving spaces) don't break your code, whereas in Lua or Python the mistake wouldn't compile.
MoonScript is awesome but I lean on compilers pretty heavily to catch my mistakes, so I sadly and regrettably admitted that I was more productive with other toolchains.
I know a lady whose entire job was literally replaced by an Excel spreadsheet that I created in a few nights of intense VB programming. It wasn't my intention to "eliminate jobs". Anyways, I got basically nothing "extra" from the company for that extra-credit work. Moral of the story is that there are plenty of problems to be solved but our compensation is only based on what we can negotiate.
Most of the time, the only thing we get for hard work is more work. This is not to say that we shouldn't improve things in our jobs or remove inefficiencies - this is just to say each individual should learn to draw the line somewhere and should be comfortable with that line.
"Hey I did extra at my job, but nobody cared. That's okay, no big deal" <-- this is good for one's mental state.
"Hey I did extra work at my job and improved process/saved money. Nobody cared, this sucks, my career is crap, my life sucks..." <-- time to either do less at the job or find a better job
> The way they've worded this betrays the internalization of their suffering as a MS developer.
While I feel less strongly about this Xbox/printing example, I remember Bill Gates saying "I reboot my computer every day" which is a similar mindset-- this culture has been forced to adopt a certain form of "hygiene" due to that same culture NOT adopting hygiene preemptively when they built their systems.
Every attempt at escaping mutability basically kills the language in the mainstream because so much of "real" programming is just bit-twiddling that gets too verbose when immutability is involved. It's a good question whether Rust nudges the world toward functional/declarative spiritual purity by placing constraints on mutation. I'm betting that No, it doesn't.
An explicit goal of Rust is to be "low level", which is an admittedly vague phrase. While you could certainly write a Rust library that clones linked lists left and right, and maybe someone would prefer that, someone else should be able to write a library that does in-place mutation with that delicious imperative goodness (badness?). To GP's point about environment variables, I think that's more of an issue with the fact that Rust tries to be compatible with existing C conventions in the OS. I don't think Rust can do much about it, since it can interface with C libraries that don't care about any Rust constraints on environment variables.
I think the "spectrum" analogy has reduced stigma overall, especially toward people with poor social skills. But it isn't always helpful.