it's good to see a little person having fun with all this technocrap that us grognards have gotten so bitter about over the years/decades. :) i hope she continues to have a blast!
(from the dedication page in SICP:)
“I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.”
~Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990)
I miss the fun in software development in the workplace. Something has changed. When I started 20+ years ago, people would get excited about something new they learned and rush to tell other people about it. Now everybody is grim, too busy grinding and "managing their visibility" to show any pleasure.
If it was just me and my friends who were joyless now, I'd chalk it up to us getting old, but my coworkers who are the same age as I was 20 years ago are just as grim if not more so. They're at a point in their career where so much cool stuff is new to them, and they're completely dry and professional about it.
For example, I was in a huddle with a coworker, and we needed something from a parquet file. My coworker said he might have time later to write a script to extract the information, and I was like, "No, check this out!" and I started up duckdb and had the answer in under a minute. My coworker's response was just a monotone, "I've never seen that before. It looks useful." Not "whoa, cool!" or even a simple "nice." It was almost like he felt worse for knowing it existed.
It makes me look around at my coworkers and wonder if everybody could possibly be as miserable as they look and sound? And if so, why?
I would not assume they’re miserable because I probably would have the same reaction if I was them.
We have just been bombarded with so much technology and advancements in the past two decades that it really takes a lot to impress us. We’ve had ppl conputing, smartphones, electric cars, semi-autonomous driving, VR and ChatGPT. A tool that parses Parquet is very very low in the totem pole, compared to all the new tech everyone has been exposed to.
Add that to the fact that we’ve also been overpromised new shiny things that turn out to he disappointments (Google Wave, metaverse, blockchain, a lot of AI products) and its not surprising most people aren’t that impressed by lots of tech these days.
In comparison, 25 years ago, just seeing a webpage load in less than a second led to a Wow moment
I’m pretty sure that fun never really disappeared but rather than developers team are now full of non "computer people", like, people who never cared about computers from the start.
I don’t say it like an insult, it’s just that for most people developing things is and have always been a career like any other. We shouldn’t blame people to not be passionate about their jobs. Everyone have to eat and if you are able to perform in this job without passion, you would be stupid not to.
But I agree that for passionate people, it’s pretty depressing.
And even for people who love this, writing SaaS apps 9 to 5 for years can easily shatter the joy of knowing cool things.
Certainly not everyone, but a lot of the people who have entered the field in the past decade are chasing the money. The never had the passion for it but they were and are good at it, so here they are.
This is what impostor syndrome looks like at an industrial scale.
I find the best antidote to that is live streams of people like geohot, a man at the top of his game who is an idiot more than half the time when coding - "No! You're missing a coma, this won't run!"
For me the joy of programming is thinking and making the simplest thing which accomplishes my need, and the regular intervals of satisfaction from a sequence of jobs well done.
When I started by career ten years ago that was how it worked. Around 2019 I noticed a change.
At some point coding was replaced with "HERE LEARN AND USE THIS NEW TOOL" fourty times a week. It is all kitbashing now. Software development has been completely replaced with devops. Low level devops does not require brain usage. It requires bashing your brains against the wall for hours trying to figure out what about your yaml file is wrong. Your boss and your coworkers are forcing you to use this and ten other antitools despite you already knowing how to adequately and quickly solve the problem with the tools you have. They advocate for the tools despite having never used them because the tools have a fancy (disgusting) react website. I have extreme new tool jadedness. Usually I hate when poeple show me new software tech, because they will demand I use it and I have to pay the price. I will never become an expert of these tools. They will be replaced in six months. Only 3-5 of our 50 microservices will use each one. Many of them will be redundant.
Joined a new startup a few months ago. The ceo had would take me asside five times a week and tell me we had to use this new tool. Kubernetes, helm, and 100 other tools appeared. At first I enjoyed the experimentation but it never ended. Work never got done.
At some point I told him "This is just a basic crud app. what the fuck are we doing. Can we stop playing around and get this done?" He didnt listen. I quit. Fuck it.
We have access to too much information about how to do things better and the tools to do those things, so the focus winds up on retraining and optimising rather than just dumping something out there and abandoning it.
Flash sucked but everyone knew it sucked and that you could kind of force it to do a lot of things.
Kind of reminds me of the quote from the Steve Jobs movie:
"The most efficient animal on the planet is a condor. The most inefficient animals on the planet are humans. But a human with a bicycle becomes the most efficient animal. And the right computer -- a friendly, easy computer that isn’t an eyesore but rather sits on your desk with the beauty of a tensor lamp -- the right computer will be a bicycle for the mind. A beautiful object -- perfect geometry, perfect finish, something you want to look at and have in your home. Flawless. And then a personal computer becomes an interpersonal computer. And what if instead of it being in the right hands, it was in everyone’s hands?"
I haven't see the movie (only a few clips), but I enjoyed hearing this analogy from Steve Jobs himself in many of his interviews [0].
Just checked the part [1] of the movie where Michael Fassbender talks about the bicycle of the mind. He is a very good actor but it's hard to match the energy and the electric focus of Steve Jobs.
The YouTube video for Vulfpeck's track, Barbara, is interspersed with the interview where he said that quote -- as well as the first take of it where he stumbled through it and then asked to restart from the beginning to reword it better!
Internet tells me that human is not the most inefficient, but pretty much down on the list. Sorry to be that guy, but to me a joke or quote needs to be true to impact :(
This "bicycle for the mind" guy died way sooner because of woo-woo bullshit magical thinking. He was an overprivileged marketer who had a better than average sense of what people would like, combined a shameless capacity to crib others' notes. Like most venerated billionaires, his main genius was his capacity to exploit.
When some people were proposing Swift remove the ability to use Emoji in variable names this was my reply:
> It’s hella presumptuous to decide that I’m not allowed to express whimsy, frustration, humor, or any other emotions in my code. Or to tell an 8 year old using Playgrounds on the iPad that he/she can’t name a variable :pig: purely because they find it funny. We don’t have to squash the joy out of everything.
As soon as I realized I could have emoji in bash function names I did a thing[0] with it. It breaks shellcheck, annoys people who I try to convince to use it, but it makes me very happy.
I hope we can keep it alive. The latest volume of Knuth is full of puzzles, which is wonderful. But then I see the other top thread on HN where people are whining that they aren't getting paid more than 99.9% of the population for sitting at a desk solving problems all day. Sometimes I think those people don't deserve to be doing this job.
Nice quote. Lost it now but I used to have a desktop wallpaper with
the old Kraftwerk cover with "ITS MORE FUN TO COMPUTE". We need
regular reminders. FWIW my little one is mastering the command line
after a year of having to type to get things. Even if she turns out
not into computers I won't grieve because if nothing else she learned
to type, which is a useful skill itself.
For me what takes the fun out of computing is that package management is severely broken. I simply haven't been able to run the latest in DL because of driver issues, compile issues, issues with containers, etc. Sure I can get it to work if I spend 1+ days on it, but it just isn't fun anymore to try out something new.
Exactly as I would do it if I were a 7yo. Speak what you will about the virtues of CSS and semantic markup, these things get in the way of having fun. And can be learned later.
Totally agree with you. Not a front end dev myself, and I have multiple variations of "how do i center a div" in my search history, haha. With varying degrees of angry expletives added to the query.
I remember getting confused/disgusted looks at my first front-end job when I said I loved CSS and would be happy to work on styling...
Later I learned that having 3 or more different ways to get an identical result is... time-consuming, at best. When they all might work slightly differently depending on several layers of context (or just not work), you realize CSS is ripe for massive pain points to spring up, and they can happen unexpectedly. I understood why everyone else hated CSS - under time pressure, it's just not worth dealing with 99.9% of the complexities for immeasurably small + abstract returns.
Eventually, I determined that I both love and despise CSS in different aspects. It's complex enough to hold both attitudes. And I'm very, very satisfied that Tailwind came along and (nearly) perfected what Bootstrap et al were figuring out before it.
I agree with you, but for shits and giggles, to modify this to be evangelist compliant, you could write this instead:
<body style="background: url('animals.jpg')">
<div style="text-align: center">
Which isn't much more complicated, and makes it clearer what's going on. I wonder if there is a transpiler like Elm that could take a single file written in a simplified language and gave you an HTML5 compliant webpage? You could argue that all the XML-but-not-actually-XML crap in HTML (angle brackets, closing tags, escaping special characters with HTML entities...) is also an impediment to beginners.
What is the value of writing all of that, compared to the simpler approach?
What will you want next in your quest of purity? Forbidding inline styles in the name of security, maybe?
I taught young girls to code (founder of nonprofit Girls Code Lincoln, based in Nebraska USA) for the past few years - I love this! A few resources that you may be interested in sharing with her, age appropriate for her:
Podcast series where we talked about historical women in STEM + a current woman in STEM - we recommended people listen to this in the car when their kids are there. https://girlscodelincoln.buzzsprout.com/
My email if you need anything at all, or would like further resources for your daughter. aakriti@TheNonprofiting.Org / info@GirlsCodeLincoln.org
Additionally, Pixar has a really good and robust coding lesson - called Pixar in a Box - https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar
Not sure if this is quite the right aged resource for her, but might be nice for you to have in your back pocket.
Happy to help with pointing you to any resources you may need to keep her engaged!
The pages load responsively, there are no apparent bugs in the code, the organization is coherent and sensical, and the writing is concise and conveys both information and the unique voice and personality of the author
This is a better-made website than like 95% of the internet, generously
I suggest you back up the HTML files as a record of her work when she was still a child, it will be a family treasure in the future :) You can even add it under your family's domain for safekeeping.
I started when I was 9, using Word as the editor. This was 5 years later and I was 14 at the time), I both wish and am ok with the content no longer being there. At least I can go back humor myself on what I put in the side-navigation.
I love this. Her little site really takes me back to the age of the internet I often miss.
Back in the 90s, fresh out of art school I knew I needed to create a portfolio website of some sort. I went to a Borders Books and got a book about 4 or 5 inches think about HTML and how to craft a site using a tool built into Netscape Navigator. Over the course of a week or so I created a site very similar in function to the one in the OP. The main difference was the content.
On my homepage I featured one of my drawings - a color pencil rendering of a very large/wide man in a jock strap looking at the viewer with a cunning smile. Yes, I was very mature. You had click on his belly to enter the site. This was where I learned to make an image map for the first time. When you clicked it he said, "Ooh, that tickles" and then you were in where the portfolio and navigation was presented.
It was all HTML 4, no javascript, no cookies or forms - all very basic stuff.
And that site got me my first real job in the design world (at an Adobe competitor called Micrografx, which later imploded). The rest is history! Thanks, Netscape.
Readit News
it's good to see a little person having fun with all this technocrap that us grognards have gotten so bitter about over the years/decades. :) i hope she continues to have a blast!
(from the dedication page in SICP:)
“I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.” ~Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990)
If it was just me and my friends who were joyless now, I'd chalk it up to us getting old, but my coworkers who are the same age as I was 20 years ago are just as grim if not more so. They're at a point in their career where so much cool stuff is new to them, and they're completely dry and professional about it.
For example, I was in a huddle with a coworker, and we needed something from a parquet file. My coworker said he might have time later to write a script to extract the information, and I was like, "No, check this out!" and I started up duckdb and had the answer in under a minute. My coworker's response was just a monotone, "I've never seen that before. It looks useful." Not "whoa, cool!" or even a simple "nice." It was almost like he felt worse for knowing it existed.
It makes me look around at my coworkers and wonder if everybody could possibly be as miserable as they look and sound? And if so, why?
We have just been bombarded with so much technology and advancements in the past two decades that it really takes a lot to impress us. We’ve had ppl conputing, smartphones, electric cars, semi-autonomous driving, VR and ChatGPT. A tool that parses Parquet is very very low in the totem pole, compared to all the new tech everyone has been exposed to.
Add that to the fact that we’ve also been overpromised new shiny things that turn out to he disappointments (Google Wave, metaverse, blockchain, a lot of AI products) and its not surprising most people aren’t that impressed by lots of tech these days.
In comparison, 25 years ago, just seeing a webpage load in less than a second led to a Wow moment
I don’t say it like an insult, it’s just that for most people developing things is and have always been a career like any other. We shouldn’t blame people to not be passionate about their jobs. Everyone have to eat and if you are able to perform in this job without passion, you would be stupid not to.
But I agree that for passionate people, it’s pretty depressing.
And even for people who love this, writing SaaS apps 9 to 5 for years can easily shatter the joy of knowing cool things.
I find the best antidote to that is live streams of people like geohot, a man at the top of his game who is an idiot more than half the time when coding - "No! You're missing a coma, this won't run!"
When I started by career ten years ago that was how it worked. Around 2019 I noticed a change.
At some point coding was replaced with "HERE LEARN AND USE THIS NEW TOOL" fourty times a week. It is all kitbashing now. Software development has been completely replaced with devops. Low level devops does not require brain usage. It requires bashing your brains against the wall for hours trying to figure out what about your yaml file is wrong. Your boss and your coworkers are forcing you to use this and ten other antitools despite you already knowing how to adequately and quickly solve the problem with the tools you have. They advocate for the tools despite having never used them because the tools have a fancy (disgusting) react website. I have extreme new tool jadedness. Usually I hate when poeple show me new software tech, because they will demand I use it and I have to pay the price. I will never become an expert of these tools. They will be replaced in six months. Only 3-5 of our 50 microservices will use each one. Many of them will be redundant.
Joined a new startup a few months ago. The ceo had would take me asside five times a week and tell me we had to use this new tool. Kubernetes, helm, and 100 other tools appeared. At first I enjoyed the experimentation but it never ended. Work never got done.
At some point I told him "This is just a basic crud app. what the fuck are we doing. Can we stop playing around and get this done?" He didnt listen. I quit. Fuck it.
last i checked it was still there 10+ years later
Flash sucked but everyone knew it sucked and that you could kind of force it to do a lot of things.
"The most efficient animal on the planet is a condor. The most inefficient animals on the planet are humans. But a human with a bicycle becomes the most efficient animal. And the right computer -- a friendly, easy computer that isn’t an eyesore but rather sits on your desk with the beauty of a tensor lamp -- the right computer will be a bicycle for the mind. A beautiful object -- perfect geometry, perfect finish, something you want to look at and have in your home. Flawless. And then a personal computer becomes an interpersonal computer. And what if instead of it being in the right hands, it was in everyone’s hands?"
Reminds me of Ratatouille: “Anyone can cook.”
We make software so that someone else can do something new with it that we ourselves never imagined.
So important to remember that someone could be… anyone!
Just checked the part [1] of the movie where Michael Fassbender talks about the bicycle of the mind. He is a very good actor but it's hard to match the energy and the electric focus of Steve Jobs.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8
[1] https://youtu.be/BZYZlzIMVw8?si=u8X_mc4BX62ypRZw&t=98
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o
https://ghijklmno.net/a-bicycle-for-the-mind/
> It’s hella presumptuous to decide that I’m not allowed to express whimsy, frustration, humor, or any other emotions in my code. Or to tell an 8 year old using Playgrounds on the iPad that he/she can’t name a variable :pig: purely because they find it funny. We don’t have to squash the joy out of everything.
[0] https://code.ofvlad.xyz/v/lightning-runner
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Like compare that mess to the elegant semantic structure of a state of the art webpage like google.com
> Open up wide! Here comes some 'content'! Quit complaining, you can handle it!
Look, it works and lets me move on to stuff that matters.
Later I learned that having 3 or more different ways to get an identical result is... time-consuming, at best. When they all might work slightly differently depending on several layers of context (or just not work), you realize CSS is ripe for massive pain points to spring up, and they can happen unexpectedly. I understood why everyone else hated CSS - under time pressure, it's just not worth dealing with 99.9% of the complexities for immeasurably small + abstract returns.
Eventually, I determined that I both love and despise CSS in different aspects. It's complex enough to hold both attitudes. And I'm very, very satisfied that Tailwind came along and (nearly) perfected what Bootstrap et al were figuring out before it.
Hard disagree on both points.
Disclaimer: I'm not found of web techs...
Also, there's nothing XML-but-not-actually about HTML. Both HTML and XML are derived from SGML.
I taught young girls to code (founder of nonprofit Girls Code Lincoln, based in Nebraska USA) for the past few years - I love this! A few resources that you may be interested in sharing with her, age appropriate for her:
Youtube series that we did where our students interviewed women in STEM - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-32uv45Ln4VJGhVr_jr6...
Podcast series where we talked about historical women in STEM + a current woman in STEM - we recommended people listen to this in the car when their kids are there. https://girlscodelincoln.buzzsprout.com/
My email if you need anything at all, or would like further resources for your daughter. aakriti@TheNonprofiting.Org / info@GirlsCodeLincoln.org
TED talk that I did about HOW to get your daughter interested in STEM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guoLTuW8AX4&t=10s
Happy to help with pointing you to any resources you may need to keep her engaged!
This is a better-made website than like 95% of the internet, generously
I like the cut of your kid's jib. Excellent work
Yes it would. There's something wonderful about the paths that a mind that hasn't been fully toned the way society wants it to explores.
Well done.
trust it more than gPT
This site rules :)
Don't you love the way children see things? So cute.
But maybe my memories are more exciting than the plain truth.
http://web.archive.org/web/20040207221902/http://home.no.net...
I started when I was 9, using Word as the editor. This was 5 years later and I was 14 at the time), I both wish and am ok with the content no longer being there. At least I can go back humor myself on what I put in the side-navigation.
Back in the 90s, fresh out of art school I knew I needed to create a portfolio website of some sort. I went to a Borders Books and got a book about 4 or 5 inches think about HTML and how to craft a site using a tool built into Netscape Navigator. Over the course of a week or so I created a site very similar in function to the one in the OP. The main difference was the content.
On my homepage I featured one of my drawings - a color pencil rendering of a very large/wide man in a jock strap looking at the viewer with a cunning smile. Yes, I was very mature. You had click on his belly to enter the site. This was where I learned to make an image map for the first time. When you clicked it he said, "Ooh, that tickles" and then you were in where the portfolio and navigation was presented.
It was all HTML 4, no javascript, no cookies or forms - all very basic stuff.
And that site got me my first real job in the design world (at an Adobe competitor called Micrografx, which later imploded). The rest is history! Thanks, Netscape.
https://donkeyontheedge.com/mahir/