
Joel Spolsky and Clive Thompson discuss the past, present, and future of coding - soheilpro
https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/17/joel-spolsky-clive-thompson-discuss-coders-software-programming/
======
anderspitman
> Joel: The big picture there is, the school system should have given up on
> trigonometry and calculus a long time ago and started teaching statistics
> and probability. The discrete math is a lot more useful.

I could probably be convinced to jump on that bandwagon.

~~~
crispyambulance

        > I could probably be convinced to jump on that bandwagon [dump calc, replace with stats]
    

I think, really, that the opposite needs to be done.

Math curriculums would do better to focus more on getting "the foundations"
right. Starting with algebra, geometry, trigonometry and real analysis
(calculus), and pursuing it rigorously for college-bound students. There
should be a focus on mastery rather than covering a wide variety of stuff
quickly.

Too many students get to college with a mathematical foundation that looks
like Swiss cheese-- with many holes in basic skills: like fractions,
exponents, trig (yes, even if they took calc in high school).

~~~
tomnipotent
Why should geometry and trig be "the foundations" while statistics is not?
Because that's the way it's always been? Sounds like a horrible reason to keep
things the same.

~~~
alxlaz
Ever tried to teach an introductory Physics class without using geometry,
trigonometry or calculus?

(Edit: for that matter, teaching statistics to students with limited exposure
to calculus is not a very successful endeavour, either...)

There are a lot of things that mathematics is fundamental to besides data
science, and schools need to address the requirements of all children, not
just those who want to write (a very limited range of) software when they grow
up.

~~~
aeternum
I hated calculus until learning Physics. It was so abstract and seemed
useless. I'd much rather be presented with a problem, like how far did this
ball travel, then learn calculus as a tool to solve that problem.

I agree with you though that attempts to teach Physics without calculus are
sorely misguided. It's ridiculous to force students to memorize kinematic
equations that can be trivially derived from each other.

~~~
shkkmo
I got lucky enough to be able to take both Calculus and Physics concurrently
from the local University rather than taking Physics without calculus from my
high school. It almost seems like they should be taught as a single
interdisciplinary class.

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ilovecaching
I have a very bleak outlook on coding after moving to the bay. The companies
that win and get big do not put stock in writing good code. They want to move
fast so they can beat people in the market. So you end up valuing people who
can do whatever it takes to scale and keep things working while ignoring your
tech debt until you’re so big you can just hire 20k engineers to clean the
mess up over the next two decades.

With this approach young engineers learn that clean code and everything people
like Martin Fowler have been saying isn’t going to get them promoted. So
people learn bad practices and we all get collectively worse at coding.

I’ve spent so much energy trying to get people to care about code quality and
qualitative improvements, but at the end of the day the people who got these
companies were they are can just say there method works and there’s no proof
it would have gone better with better code or that they would have survived at
all.

~~~
Deimorz
You're commenting about this on Hacker News, a site that--from a technical
perspective--does almost everything "wrong", or using methods that have been
obsolete for 10+ years. It uses tables for layout. It does "AJAX" by creating
an <img> tag and setting the src= as the url to request. It has an awful url
structure (e.g. item?id=20996837). And on and on, I could list so much more.

But you (and I, and thousands of others) still use the site and probably
didn't even notice or care about any of that. This is one of the largest, most
heavily concentrated technical audiences on the internet, and even though
those are the exact people you think would be _most_ discerning about it,
obviously nobody truly cares about how much isn't being done "properly".
People will argue all day in the comments here about the right way to do
things, but since they're here they clearly don't think it's important when
deciding what they use themselves.

It's the same for everyone else, with every other site and product. As long as
it works, the reality is that almost nobody cares how much of a mess anything
is internally.

~~~
blub
You've picked a poor example to prove your point because web development
collectively jumped the shark and websites using technology from around 2006
are the most reliable and easy to use.

Back then usability, graceful degradation and progressive enhancement were
appreciated by developers. Nowadays we have the complexity of Enterprise Java
except with less reliability and in JS. And ads and tracking and virality
everywhere.

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lozaning
Totally unrelated to this topic, but I absolutely love Joel's "You suck at
excel" youtube video, done in the same vein as the old "You suck at photoshop"
tutorials someone made.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c)
I find it absolutely hilarious, and I can almost guarantee you'll actually
learn something new you can do in excel.

~~~
LeonB
I made this subsite:
[https://excel.secretgeek.net/](https://excel.secretgeek.net/) to make it
easier to share the video internally at work.

Sending a video about "Secrets of Mastering Excel" is less like to humiliate
your colleague than sending them a link to "You suck at excel"

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teddyh
> _Funnily enough, lots of coders aren’t that great at math, so long as you
> remember to zero index, you’re fine._

I would add “…and keep your ranges as lower-inclusive, upper-exclusive.”
Interestingly, both of these have related reason why:
[https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF)

~~~
niccl
Except for SQL, where between means both inclusive Grr!

~~~
teddyh
Yes, but you can always ignore BETWEEN and instead use the PostgreSQL range
types with the @> operator.

[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/rangetypes.html](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/rangetypes.html)

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dpflan
I'm curious: How did Joel Spolsky gain such clout and influence?

~~~
strikelaserclaw
He co-invented the website which all developers use on a day to day basis?

~~~
astura
He was famous before stackoverflow; the success of stackoverflow was
attributed to it's creators having a large audience to seed it with questions
and answers.

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srcmap
I love Stack Overflow's podcast. Wonder what happen to that?

~~~
ProAm
Which version? The early ones with Joel and Jeff were great. The later ones
were overly produced and pretty terrible.

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AlchemistCamp
I loved Joel's old podcast, and I didn't discover it until last year. Is there
any audio available for this?

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fuzzythinker
I like Andre Staltz's Future of Cycle.js (more about webdev in general):
[https://vimeo.com/216975979](https://vimeo.com/216975979)

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afpx
Github-type companies become repositories of functions, and programmers pick
the function they want and just do functional composition.

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gautamcgoel
Jesus Christ, is Ben Bova, not Ben Boba...

~~~
srbby
Jesus Christ is Ben Bova? Well, that's something new for me.

~~~
gautamcgoel
loool, feel into my own trap!

~~~
gautamcgoel
*fell

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gilbetron
Ben Boba = Ben Bova + Boba Fett?

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tictoc
Joel is a great speaker. I am 100% on board with whatever he says. He's
awesome.

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miguelmota
A good presentation on the history of programming and how we got to where we
are is

Bob Martin - The Future of Programming

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc)

