

Your "-fu" should be considered harmful. - enneff
https://plus.google.com/106356964679457436995/posts/iVgMyKK9QpN

======
krig
I don't like this statement at all, sorry. It's a very anti-intellectual
statement. Are any concepts that are difficult to grasp inherently worth less?
That would make all of logic and math bad. Logic is not inherently easy for
humans. We are a very emotional and irrational bunch.

I don't agree that technologies are bad just because they are difficult to
master. The learning curve is utterly irrelevant to their inherent value.
There are lots of things that are both incredibly difficult and amazingly
valuable.

I also think this statement betrays an incredible short-sightedness. You are
looking at the technology you know and think "Wow! This is so simple! Why
aren't those things I don't know this simple?" Your technology appears simple
to you primarily because it is yours. That's not a relativistic statement to
imply that all technology is equally difficult to learn, it's just how our
perspective shifts as we internalize new concepts.

To me, C++ is a lot simpler than Go. I've tried to grasp how to use things
like interfaces and channels in Go, but I haven't quite figured it out yet.
C++, on the other hand, has been my primary tool for over two decades. The
things that appear unreasonably complex to you make sense to me because I am
familiar with the reasons they are there. Does that mean that Go is difficult
and C++ is simple? Of course not. To someone who doesn't know a thing about
programming, they are both absolutely arcane. Even the concept of variables is
fundamentally difficult for people to grasp. It's an entirely abstract
concept, and abstraction is not easy.

A better measure for the utility of the technology would be to ask how well it
solves the problems it is intended for. Empirically, it would seem that C and
C++ are both the best tools available for different sets of problems. Go is
new, but I don't see it being adopted anywhere outside Google yet. I've looked
at it, and while it has some attractive traits, it is fundamentally shaped by
a different set of priorities than my own. I just don't find the problems it
claims to solve all that problematic.

~~~
jbarham
> Go is new, but I don't see it being adopted anywhere outside Google yet.

1\. <http://blog.golang.org/2011/04/go-at-heroku.html>

2\. <http://blog.golang.org/2011/12/building-stathat-with-go.html>

3\. [http://www.3dfuture.com.au/2011/12/interview-with-the-
tinker...](http://www.3dfuture.com.au/2011/12/interview-with-the-tinkercad-
developers/)

~~~
krig
Heroku is a meta-adoption, not actual use. How much is it actually being used
by the users of Heroku? The other two examples are companies I've never heard
of.

Of course my statement is hyperbole; I'm sure there are people who use Go, and
I didn't intend to hate on Go: I do think it's an interesting language that I
am trying to learn. I'm just saying that I haven't seen it in use, and that
perhaps the simplicity that its authors are touting lies mostly in their own
familiarity with it. Go contains a lot of new and unfamiliar concepts, and
it's not trivial to figure out how to best solve a problem using it. But
remember that the whole point of my argument is that I don't consider
simplicity an interesting criterion for the value of a technology - I can
think Go is complex and interesting at the same time.

edit: Relevant information regarding the above examples, from the linked page
about Tinkercad: "I also used to work on the Go team at Google so I had used
it in production before."

~~~
enneff
> Heroku is a meta-adoption, not actual use. How much is it actually being
> used by the users of Heroku?

A huge part of their billing system is written in Go.

> I'm just saying that I haven't seen it in use, and that perhaps the
> simplicity that its authors are touting lies mostly in their own familiarity
> with it.

The creators are also expert C and C++ programmers, and have also designed
several other languages. Go was born out of frustration with the thorns,
inconsistencies, and surprises that plague a lot of languages. My personal
experience is with JavaScript - I wrote JS code every day for several years,
and still regularly had to use the console to test essential elements of the
language, often with surprising results.

We've tried to fix that with Go. Its features are designed to be simple in
isolation and predictable when combined. This is the crux of my Google+ post.
Our tools should be clean and consistent, so we can spend more time thinking
about what we're building, not how the tool might explode if we hold it in the
wrong way.

------
tikhonj
I think the main idea here is wrong. There is nothing wrong with technologies
that require significant experience to master; the issue is with technologies
that require significant experience but are still inefficient.

Plenty of the best tools are moderately difficult to learn: Emacs, Vi, the
command line, Linux, Haskell...etc. However, once you learn them well, you
become more efficient than you could be on a tool that's easier to learn. And
this is good: sacrificing a bit of extra time to learn a technology that will
make you more efficient is usually a good trade because learning takes a
constant amount of time while being more efficient is at least linear.

The real issue is with tools that are arbitrarily complex. The DOM is a great
example: its poor API, browser inconsistencies, weird layout rules...etc do
not help you, but are difficult to learn and use. So the real issue is that
the parts that are difficult to learn present no advantages over a simpler,
easier to learn version.

~~~
rsanchez1
The browser inconsistencies is the main obstacle, for the DOM, CSS, JS, and ny
other web technology dependent on the browser.

~~~
duncan_bayne
I disagree. One could make the same argument about CPUs - look at all the
different architectures out there. However, a good toolset (ISO C + autoconf)
allows for fairly easy development of code that runs on a very wide range of
platforms.

------
mrspeaker
Maybe it's me who missed the point - but I think the author isn't saying "hard
things aren't worth it" (as all of the comments here seem to suggest), but
he's saying that truly mastering the warts of a technology that is full of
warts is a waste of time.

I think the faulty logic there is that _every_ technology over a certain age
is going to seem full of warts... so the alternative it keep moving on to
trying to master the latest and greatest buzzwords.

~~~
enneff
Yes, that is what I meant. Thanks for re-stating it so clearly.

To your point, I have two reactions. The first is that I feel you are being
pessimistic. To some appearances software seems to be getting worse, but if
you step back we actually have some pretty amazing tools these days. I
personally find Go a better language than any other I've used. (disclosure:
I'm part of the Go team.)

My second reaction is: sure, of course we should move on to new things. We
don't drive the same cars we did 40 years ago, yet software moves way faster
than the auto industry and we're still using C for a lot of stuff. Programmers
should be more adept at re-skilling for new languages and tools. The best ones
already are.

------
atdt
CSS is a bit of a hobby horse, no? The specifications and implementations have
matured considerably over the past few years, making the ugly hacks of yore
unnecessary. If you can afford a somewhat degraded experience on IE7, the
experience of writing CSS can be pleasurable and hassle-free.

As to JavaScript: it has also seen massive improvements, but I'd like to
emphasize a different point: namely that JavaScript's quirks, while annoying,
are hardly arcane. They are very well known, and ably covered by any
respectable introduction to the language. Most have established workarounds
that are trivial to master (always providing the optional radix parameter to
parseInt, for example), and the existence of excellent linters like jslint and
jshint (the latter a community-driven fork of the former) makes it trivially
easy to remember to do the right thing.

------
duncan_bayne
I actually spiked an idea like this a while back ... basically the idea was an
in-browser Scheme REPL with something like SBCL's save-lisp-and-die.

Stumbling blocks were my painful lack of familiarity with Lisp development in
general, and BiwaScheme's lack of environment reflection. I tried hacking a
macro wrapper for definition that saved the definition somewhere serializable
but ... yuck.

Perhaps ClojureScript could be a good basis for this (once it's out of alpha
and features reflection and whatnot)? One could build a REPL-based development
environment (_not_ an IDE!) that behaved somewhat like SLIME, and integrated
with all the new hotness (GitHub, Heroku etc. etc.)

Mightn't need much in the way of new technology, so much as a whole lot of
nice glue to hold it all together.

~~~
mahmud
You listed potential tools but haven't explained what you're trying to do.

~~~
duncan_bayne
Well, to be honest, I didn't really know ... my plan was to hack around and
see what was possible :-)

The vague idea I had was for some sort of modern Lisp-based development
environment. REPL-based, rather than an IDE. Targetting HTML5 web browsers
(maybe only one to start with?). Social coding baked right in, so it'd be
trivial to start projects, fork them, share gists, etc. etc. And then the
final step would be publishing to Heroku from within the REPL.

So, maybe start off with an in-browser REPL. Add serialization of state. Then
plug that into GitHub. Then some sort of deploy step to Heroku. Lots and lots
of keyboard accelerators, help goodness and a decent debugger.

But for the moment, it seems to be beyond my ability and / or beyond existing
browser-based Lisp technologies.

------
Tichy
Weird that he mentions JavaScript, because it seems to me the simplest
language of all. Except for a few quirks that you can usually ignore, what
other language is so small and logical (everything builds on hashes and
closures, basically)?

If I think of Ruby, I think "ok, I can get things done, but don't get me
started with the metaprogramming". It can get seriously metaphysical... Not so
in JavaScript.

------
LefterisJP
This statement is just wrong. No matter how many abstraction layers you put on
top of a computer, it will be complicated.

Yes they are good, and it's great to be able to do simple tasks with just one
line of code but there are points where you can't, or you need better
performance, or ,or , or ...

In that case you would need to delve deeper, behind the abstraction layer and
you would need to atually understand what's happening down there. If all you
know is programming with all these abstractions without understanding what's
actually happening underneath then you would be in for a surprise.

And with new technologies coming out on the hardware side all the time, more
parallelization, 3D graphics, quantum computing (?maybe), the APIs to use them
in software will also be complicated. Nobody said that IT is an easy field.

~~~
nailer
The poster is discussing technologies known for inconsistency and irrelevant
design considerations.

Sendmail pre sendmail X is full of what is now useless code to handle UUCP and
X400 mail. JS has a bunch of rarely used cases where objects of different
types can be added together to reduce usually unwanted results.

Postfix, Python, and Coffeescript are close to as simple as possible, but no
simpler. This is an excellent design goal.

------
drivebyacct2
I don't know that JavaScript is so much hard as just different. It's easily to
be very expressive in JavaScript and the prototype nature of the language adds
power. I think the idea that JavaScript is hard comes from developers that
didn't learn it properly or just hack (not in a flattering sense) on it
without understanding it.

That having been said, I "understand" CSS, and always feel like I'm hacking on
it no matter what I do.

~~~
enneff
CSS is by far the worst of the technologies I listed, but JavaScript is full
of bizarre stuff that can trip you up. The most obvious example is the global
variable declaration thing. I've seen highly JS programmers with years of
experience screwed by simply leaving out a "var" (in fact, I think something
like this was posted to HN not that long ago), but this is something that
could easily have been avoided were the language better designed.

------
shadowmint
Seriously HN?

So now a casual 88-word status post is number 16 on the list?

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this list for _hacks_?

What is this? Andrew moping about disliking c++? I couldn't care less.

The quality of HN articles just seems to drop week by week.

~~~
xd
I voted you up. Not sure why you are being voted down as you've made a valid
point. I found many of the replies awful, for instance one guy states:

"Our children will laugh and wonder how we got anything done with the
primitive tools at our disposal."

There are far to many people out there that want to be developers, mechanics,
artists, musicians etc etc but give up at the first hurdle and look for
something to blame for their failure .. it's a very common human trait and not
one I expected to see entertained on HN, either.

~~~
enneff
I think it's reasonable for my post to be the subject of discussion. As
evidenced by the discussion here, there are many views on the subject.

As for that specific comment, I don't know that I agree with it or that you
are taking it in the right spirit. It seems to me a light-hearted take on the
fact that things that seemed advanced to us 30 years ago seem primitive to us
now, and that our descendants might feel the same way in another 30 years.
Again, that's not my point, merely a more charitable reading of that comment.

The point of my post was not to blame any of my tools for anything. It was an
observation that we shouldn't praise ourselves for mastering the minutiae of
environments that suck. We should recognize design failings and try to build
better tools. I've personally had great success writing software in
JavaScript, among other languages, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

