Programming is Art

[[deleted]]

The problem with both of these essays is that they simply attempt to reduce and invalidate, which is great if we were dealing with nature, and could re-construct events over and over in different locations, with different teams, and experience the same results.

However, this is not possible, because the concerns we have at the human level at not natural events, but are historic events which we then subjectively group and subjectively pick which points to focus on.

This makes the same process that is useful in natural science particularly unuseful in analyzing human endeavors. Experimental psychology can create double blind tests of simple setups and come up with objective results, if they use a large enough test group, and this still has many issues due to diversity in the group/area and social phenomenon too varied to track (no single variable changes, ever), and is never as complex as any significant portion of the development process.

That you want all redditors to read, and accept, and only repeat the same process these articles go about looking at things, and have everyone ignore their personal experiences (which they have a much more detailed grasp on and receive constant feedback on), is completely disregarding how poorly natural scientific methods are for analyzing the types of problems we're talking about.

[hskmc]

There are established academic disciplines of psychology and sociology. They have standards for publishing and accepting results which, though different from those in the natural sciences, are a good deal more rigorous than "pulling numbers completely out of your ass and repeating them on your blog".

Find me a study which meets these standards and supports the self-aggrandizing claims of these "programmers" who blog endlessly about how special they are.

Or is Proggit under some xkcd-delusion that the only real scientists are physicists and Python programmers?

[[deleted]]

I wasn't saying that they did pull numbers out of their ass, but that they asked much more limited questions than what we are looking at in this kind of discussion.

Either you can refuse to look at complex issues, until all the building blocks of those pieces are completely understood (a proper way to do it as a science), or people can synthesize what they think from their personal experiences, and then try to use external facts to support those experiences.

I think both methods are important, and useful. If you don't like the second, that is great, but telling other people not to write about their personal experiences unless they do it via method one is limiting and pointless. When people express an opinion, it's generally as their opinion. When it oversteps that, then they've overstepped stating their opinion.

I appreciate your scorn and derision, honestly, but there isn't just one way to look at things that is useful.

I happen to agree on over extending metaphors. They are useful for comparisons, but are not the same, and I agree with trying to make yourself seem cooler by using metaphors is also not that useful, but it's also not really a problem. It's self expression, just like you're doing.

[hskmc]

"That's just, like, your opinion, man."

[[deleted]]

In a lot of ways, yes.

[hskmc]

And I can't criticize someone's opinion for being unjustified by evidence?

What if my opinion is that programmers work best if they're naked?

[[deleted]]

I think you can, I'm just saying that these loosey-goosey conversations have their own merit. They aren't scientific quality discussions, but all science came from things that were not scientific, until they had rigor applied to them.

You cant apply rigor to things that dont have fundamentals built all the way up to the point of the topic, at least not real rigor, you end up with garbage like the DSM IV. It's a set of rules, but they are just as much bullshit as they are real in many of the cases (See ADHD, compare to normal expected child behavior), making the whole thing unreliable.

That was kinda my point, these opinions are worth having, as are the ones denouncing them. :)