
The Ayn Rand Software Engineering Philosophy - tabtab
http://wiki.c2.com/?AynRandDesignPhilosophy
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AndrewUnmuted
This seems needlessly divisive and the author's apparent obsession with
unhinging Rand makes their point much less clear.

It also shows a very shallow and uninformed understanding of Rand's
epistemology. She explored the concept of 'definition' in her epistemology:

> It is important to remember that a definition implies all the
> characteristics of the units, since it identifies their essential, not their
> exhaustive, characteristics; since it designates existents, not their
> isolated aspects; and since it is a condensation of, not a substitute for, a
> wider knowledge of the existents involved.

The above demonstrates that Rand was in favor of boiling a concept down to its
fundamentals. She was against understanding a concept from the perspective of
a non-essential trait, such as the kind of trait one with a big stick up their
butt would apply to UI design, as the 'Ayn' character in the submitted webpage
does.

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trapperkeeper74
Call a spade a spade. It’s nutty, libertarian, billionaire propaganda.

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jngreenlee
Your comment's not backed up by evidence. I can think of more right-wing
(Koch, et al) and left-wing billionaires (Soros, et al) with much more
influence than...who exactly?

Also worth noting that libertarian != objectivist. There's many who espouse
only one of those. Religious gun-focused libertarians for example.

And nutty propaganda is just mud slinging. How Diogenian of you!

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neilk
> Are you sure about that? Do you think Google (substitute your favorite SW
> company here) "makes coding decisions based on what's the most likely
> staffing"? Or do you think they endeavor to maintain a top-notch staff so
> they don't have to make such compromises?

Uh, this is backwards. At Google they won’t even let you do substantial work
until you’ve proven that your code can pass a readability review. And you have
to do that process for every language you work in. I don’t know of any company
that takes readability more seriously.

Writing easily-readable, easily-reviewed code is WAY harder than doing “10xer”
incomprehensible hackery.

Good design is virtually synonymous with clarity.

~~~
tabtab
Different organizations have different approaches. Some try to get "the best
deal" on developers, while others will pay a premium for what they consider
higher-end developers. Further, non-software companies may view this
differently because the hiring managers may not understand software well
enough to judge and compare on abilities, and focus on mostly salary.

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delojoyent
The author has clearly never read Ayn Rand.

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YuriGrinshteyn
The commenter clearly has and hasn't yet recovered.

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jngreenlee
Can someone clarify what is going on in this prose?

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HumanDrivenDev
I would, but I'm still waiting for the pin wheel to stop spinning...

I miss the old C2.

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plaguuuuuu
what is this site?

it took about 3 minutes to load 10kb of text in times new roman, wtf

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s73ver_
The spinning pinwheel isn't the joke?

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tabtab
It's working for me. Maybe there's a browser-version-specific bug.

