On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 3:05 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by bferrell
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

I'll paraphrase what I took from your brief comment. You think that Lennart is a know it all... and know it alls shouldn't be that way... but because they are know it alls... {something}.

While I could speculate what {something} is or could be... or {somethings} I just wanted to ask... have you been around programmers much? Seriously... (and I say this half jokingly)... they are all "know it alls". Almost no one ever likes anyone else's code. They'd rather scrap it and write their own... so that they can understand it... at least for a year or two. But then again, another trait of programmers (and sysadmins, etc) is that they want to be "lazy" and perhaps accepting someone else's code because it works well enough... and it means they can be lazy and not have to write it themselves... that's sort of a balance where they can accept other's code... even though if they wrote it themselves it would obviously be much better.

One bold thing I like about Lennart, not that what I like matters for anything, is that one of his public stances has been... and I'll paraphrase... "rather than papering over problems, or adding yet another layer-of-fix on top of an underlying problem... he/they will do their best to fix things that are broken rather than allowing them to continue to be broken". Many others just say... "yeah, that's broken but we are used to the brokenness and are even somewhat fond of our workarounds... so fixing it is out of the question." That is just one tiny aspect I enjoy. YMMV.

Ok, ok... there might be a few humble programmers out there... but they are really just aliens disguised as humans... or just programming until "something better" comes along.

to post comments

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 7:13 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (3 responses)

> "rather than papering over problems, or adding yet another layer-of-fix on top of an underlying problem... he/they will do their best to fix things that are broken rather than allowing them to continue to be broken"

Some days I wish there were more of these kinds of people. At one point I read an article (which I can no longer find) which coined a term "broken API syndrome" or "fixed interface syndrome" or something like that.

Basically, there are situations where you're coding against an API which doesn't quite support one feature you need. And instead of looking behind the API (which you can because it's open source) and making a small fix/change there, you end up writing chunks of horrible fragile code on top of the API just to make it work.

This happens even in projects where both sides of the API are in the same repository. It drives me nuts sometimes.

I have great respect for people who get in there and fix broken APIs, even though they are rendering large chunks of other people's work obsolete. The world in the long run is better off.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 7:29 UTC (Thu) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (2 responses)

You "broken API problem" is also sometimes known as "The platform problem".

https://lwn.net/Articles/443531/

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 11:50 UTC (Thu) by njd27 (subscriber, #5770) [Link] (1 responses)

The counter argument is that it is the "Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers" approach.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 4:10 UTC (Tue) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link]

It's a balancing act. A good lead knows "when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em". A bad one recognizes that it's easier and more satisfying to start from scratch and is biased towards that. A lazy or shy one recognizes that it's less work and less risk to make small hacks to solve short term problems, and is biased towards that.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 19:30 UTC (Thu) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

I've known lots of humble programmers - in fact some of the best ones I've known are. You just don't notice them because they aren't screaming / broadcasting / grandstanding. Now marketing is great and necessary and valuable .. but it's not engineering skill. One guy I've known for years, I was at a mutual friends house, and the mutual friend says something like "x was the president of Apache" . I laugh and like no! Then I turn to x, and I go like, you're not. And he just laughs and says yes, I am.... I knew he had been contributing code to a lot of projects, but hey, we all like to code...

In general, people who a jerks with skill like to rationalize saying "it's just the way you have to be to be good at X". When, really, they're just jerks who are good at X. And we don't notice all the quiet humble people pushing things a long.

I know this because, especially in my younger years, I would say I was the jerk out of the three mentioned in my anecdote above. But I was never the most skilled. Had my moments, but not the most skilled.

Being a jerk vs humble often corresponds to fame and visibility, but not to actual skill.

How many here knew who Brian Fox was before shellshock? I doubt most of the code in GNU has been written by Stallman. Stallman is very useful as a spokesperson for free software - but that doesn't mean you have to be like him to make widely used libre software.