Rowan Thorpe

I’ve been scrolling the comments on this post for a while (longer than I should) and just want to say it is one of the most refreshing collective displays of thoughtfulness and empathy I have read online in far too long. Even the back-and-forwards where people disagree on details or semantics are still overwhelmingly positive, insightful, and respectable on all sides. Another comment here used a brilliant term “merciless insincerity”, and personally I’ve been leaning in a dangerously cynical direction lately about its prevalence. Although I know I am old & resilient enough to not let it capsize me I despise when so much lowest-common-denominator thinking hardens my shell and wallpapers a layer of apathy over who I really am (the angry-yet-optimistic teenager from the 80s/90s who screamed into the void about the climate-emergency, the corrosion of democracy by short-term vote-winning & fundraising, and - more relevantly - the toxicifying impact men and women have had on society - at interpersonal, familial, regional, national, and international scales - by regurgitating thoughtless archetypes and flagwaving in lieu of questioning reality from a fearless standpoint of “open-minded but critical, optimistic but sceptical, confident but fallibilistic”. Discussions like these are some of the very few bastions of antidote left for that cynicism and apathy. What blows my mind is that it is apparent a nontrivial proportion of you who are young (well, much younger than me) are introspecting and expressing yourselves about the subject better than I ever could. When I see the flood of toxic (and idiotically childish) nonsense almost everywhere else, discussions like these truly help bolster a dangerously scarce resource called “hope for the future”, and reinforces for me why about 99.9℅ of my “social online reading” time is spent on Lemmy lately. Gandhi said “be the change you wish to see in the world”, and it’s worth considering that what you are all writing here is a good example of you doing exactly that (even if you hadn’t realised or intended). It adds up, when groups of people give each other the chance to be truly unafraid (instead of “playing tough” - which merely broadcasts how truly afraid someone really is).

That term “merciless insincerity” is an amazingly concise yet thorough way to capture one of the pervasive things I get most frustrated by (across the many countries I’ve lived in, so it is not a georestricted behaviour). Whenever I try to describe it I get too wordy. I’m stealing that.

I long ago stopped getting caught up in “that discussion” about recent trends despite a stream of people lobbing leading questions to get the ball rolling. Because I also try to not do so more rudely than necessary, I have developed several diplomatically worded (or at least ambiguous enough to float opaquely off to the side of the offense spectrum) ways of essentially saying the following: The simplest and cheapest way of [A] learning the “computer science” end of software is by becoming proficient in Lisp, [B] learning the “engineering” end of software by becoming proficient in Forth, [C] learning how “busywork” is a dangerous and demoralising thing to confuse with “actual work” by maintaining some Java code, [D] learning how insidious and self-sabotaging “expert beginner syndrome” is by reading a lot of the relevent code-reviews and blogposts when maintaining Javascript & Python projects, [E] learning how mob-mentality and populism can lead to selective blindness and architectural stubbornness by working with large volumes of C & C++ code, [F] learning how it is all really abstraction-layers over something akin to an old-shool phone switchboard by working with Assembler, [G] learning how the only work with longevity is that which stands on the shoulders of giants by using Fortran libraries, [H] learning how the mere act of developing using languages with baked-in discipline can be inherently educational by using DbC/TDD/BDD/dependent-type/formally-verifying/etc based languages (SPARK-Ada, Haskell, Eiffel, ACL2, Rust, etc), and then [I] learning how - after a certain level of experience - the languages, frameworks, and tools become less important than the engineers’s mindset and the work that happens both before and after the fingers hit the keyboard…by finding semi-performant techniques for implementing masochistic things like a VM and a network stack in Bash script (as hobby tasks, not for real use). If they are coming from a more hands-on/hardware background I also recommend [J] how eye-opening it is to maintain your own customized LibreCMC image flashed onto an open router (the older/smaller the HW the better, because you have to be increasingly creative with your kernel & OS configs), and [K] how educational it is getting a RISC-V working on an FPGA. I top it off by saying that [L] despite coding on-and-off since my start with z80 assembler on an Amstrad in the mid-80s I still feel like a beginner with so much to learn, and [M] that fact is by far the part I love most about the field (not just field of “work” but of “mental endeavour”) - far more than status/seniority/raises. I find I don’t get bombarded so much with JS-framework-du-jour zealotry and expert-beginnerism after that.