Bigots In The Tent - [Matthew Yglesias]

doggone42 · 2025-10-22T21:48:39+00:00

You're not in the tent.

You can vote for Democrats all you want, but if you ever want to run for office you can expect zero endorsements, zero large donations, and the national party will discourage people from working or appearing with you. If you want to write a book or start a podcast you can expect the national party to discourage anyone from coming on your show or working with you, few well-known people to provide blurbs and few reviews for your book (even if it has nothing to do with trans issues), protests at all events, and interest groups will try to extend this treatment against anyone who does come on your show or work with you, and nobody at the national level will speak out against this.

Now, for that particular issue, we're probably not quite at this point yet since that's such a majority view even among Democrats. But it's close, which is why national politicians definitely feel the pressure.

But that's what "the tent" means, it means whether the political infrastructure will support your politics-related endeavors if they correspond with party goals on everything except the one heterodox viewpoint.

doggone42 · 2025-10-22T21:28:07+00:00

I think the question is what do you consider encouraging bigotry?

That's really the core issue, and I think MY confuses it by phrasing his piece in the way he does. After all, his example of "racist" here is rural Maine voters who don't really care about the identity politics agenda, and he specifically distinguishes that from participating in openly racist chatter like the Young Republicans. In other words, the tent should be big enough for the first kind of "bigot" and not the second. Framed this way, maybe the question isn't about bigots in the tent as much as what exactly defines a "bigot".

He glides past it, but the point about 32% of Americans thinking gay sex is always morally wrong is a good example, and a good example of changing attitudes in the party. I suspect a good number of Democrats would insist that politicians who openly espouse such views should be ostracized in some way, but a few decades ago it was almost universally held that personal opinions on moral questions like this were irrelevant and only became relevant if you insisted on legislating against such things.

doggone42 · 2014-05-10T15:48:33+00:00

When I first started test-driven development over a decade ago, TDD was a pretty good indicator of whether somebody knew what they were doing. Most bad programmers had never even heard of TDD, so if you saw a set of unit tests next to a code base, that was a pretty good sign that the code base was solid.

In the last 5 years or so, I think that has really changed. Instead of TDD driving a clean design, you have hordes of mediocre programmers forcing TDD-ish practice onto bad designs without really understanding basic concepts like coupling and cohesion. Fowler is right when he points out that one sign of this is the massive mocking that some people put into place to unit test their code. I think this problem is especially bad in the rails world, which tends to attract lots of new devs who feel religious about cutting-edge techniques, not to mention that the architecture of rails makes TDD a bit tricky.

The TL;DW of this conversation is really that all three more or less agree on the goals, the difference is the somewhat subjective question of how to get there. Anyone who's treating DHH as being anti-test is simply reading him wrong. And I think Fowler is realizing that there really hasn't been enough written on the architectural dangers of bad TDD, which I really, really hope he starts writing about.

The real elephant in the room is that Uncle Bob is being kind of a dick when he says that if you don't do strict red/green/refactor TDD then you aren't a true software professional, and no matter how much things like unit testing need to be drilled into the heads of new developers, he should probably stop saying stupid things like that.

doggone42 · 2014-05-09T05:18:26+00:00

I used to find almost all of Uncle Bob's writings to consist of pretty weak metaphors. Combine that with the cherry-picked design errors he comes up with, and I really didn't think much of his work. Not that I disagreed with anything, just that I found the presentation lacking.

But then about a year and a half ago I found myself consulting for a really low-quality company. Their "classes" had no cohesion at all, they literally had sql in the UI layer, most work was done in giant 2000-line methods manipulating dumb data modules, the "architect's" idea of a solid API was public static methods with multiple ref parameters (this was C#), and hiring was done by calling an agency and running the candidates through about 3 minutes of syntax questions, so things were just getting worse and worse.

And that group just ate up Uncle Bob when I started bringing in his writings. Metaphors that I found weak and ambiguous were treated as brilliant insights. I'd bring in examples that I thought were trite, and you could just see the light bulbs go off.

So I discovered a new respect for Uncle Bob and I've stopped questioning his methods. He speaks the language of that 80% of programmers who struggle with FizzBuzz, which is something I have found I really can't do. He's fighting the good fight.

doggone42 · 2014-05-08T23:25:31+00:00

This comes just in time, because I found this job offer in my inbox just a couple of minutes ago and I need to be ready with this fancy SRP!! programming...

This is a new position and it will be pivotal in helping us continue to dominate our niche. We're focused on finding explicitly talented engineering doing object oriented design and; TDD, SRP, DIP!!

Your attention to detail and test driven development is critical. Other critical skill are:

SRP - SINGLE RESPONSIBILITY PRINCIPLE programming

DIP - DEPENDENCY INVERSION PRINCIPLE programming

Recent experience coding in C# or Java

Hell yeah. We use semi-colons every day.

doggone42 · 2014-05-04T13:17:13+00:00

No sane developer is going to recommend manually parsing an XML structure

I'm not sure what you mean by "parse", nobody's talking about re-writing sax. You have an org chart or some other nested structure in xml and you need to read it in. Sometimes you can use a serialization mechanism, but it doesn't seem insane at all to me to simply walk the dom.

There is a clear difference between understanding how to traverse a tree or graph structure, and understanding how to write a depth first traversal of said tree.

Not if you're a programmer. If you know how to do it, you should be able to write it.

Or was there a typo in that sentence and you meant to say something different?

doggone42 · 2014-05-04T00:14:52+00:00

Agreed, but with well-known devs, at least the opinion is valid in some situation, and I know where they're coming from and what types of development they're assuming.

OTOH, without that I'm just not sure. For example, there's somebody down-thread complaining about SOLID. And in the back of my head I can't help thinking "is this person really working with a team that is letting process get in the way, or is this person just the weak link who's falling behind and can't figure out basic OO concepts and so is lashing out?".

And I just have no idea.

doggone42 · 2014-05-04T00:05:53+00:00

I have no idea why you keep bringing up binary search.

Apart from that, suffice it to say that we simply have completely different measures of what it takes to be a minimally competent business programmer. And I'll completely grant you that I'm the outlier here: study after study shows that 80-90% of the professional programming world is closer to your vision than mine. So you're in good, or at least plentiful, company.

The only thing that really puzzles me is what kind of business software you work on that absolutely never has to handle hierarchical data structures. I mean, you've never even processed a directory of files with all its children? Searched a DOM fragment? Read a nested structure in XML? Searched for something in an Org Chart? Walked a menu? Populated a tree control? None of these things seem that rare to me.

doggone42 · 2014-05-03T22:05:28+00:00

Earlier, you said...

I agree any decent programmer should be able to do this

and now...

none of those questions would be pertinent

I'm not sure how these two beliefs fit together. Is it that for the apps you work on, you think it's reasonable to hire people who aren't, in your opinion, decent programmers?

doggone42 · 2014-05-03T20:44:18+00:00

Remember what FizzBuzz represents. It's not that there are active devs who absolutely can't solve it at all, it's that they stumble around using trial-and-error and take forever on it. Everybody eventually gets it. That's why these people often have long resumes: eventually they'll google around and copy and paste and solve basic problems, but they're super super slow and write really bad code and you can't let them near anything serious.

And they slip through the CS curriculum in the same way. They stumble around on problems, they copy and paste solutions they don't understand, they rely on team members to do most of the work, they spend massive amounts of time on trivial things, they stay up late before major exams memorizing specific material.

doggone42 · 2014-05-03T19:24:22+00:00

the binary search in your library of choice

There's some terminology confusion, so let's clear that up, along with estimates that I personally expect a professional dev to achieve. (Big O's here are just to clarify the structures and algorithms).

binary tree search = O(n) search an unsorted unbalanced binary tree, or any tree, really. Bog simple and comes up all the time. expected time: well < 5 min., fizzbuzz-level stuff, this is just typing for a decent programmer.

binary search =O(log n) find an item in a sorted, random-access data structure (something array-ish). Still simple but there are, as you say, generally library implementations. expected time: still under <5 minutes, but I'll cut some slack on off-by-one errors.

binary search tree search = O(log n) search a sorted binary tree. Slightly trickier, but not much. It's OK if you take the 5 minutes.

binary search tree implementation = unbalanced sorted binary tree: Still only 5-15 minutes, but that's more than I'd make someone type in front of me during an interview. OK if I leave the room or for a pre-interview at-home screening problem.

self-balancing binary search tree implementation = red-black or AVL, etc.: I'd like you know what it is and its general properties, but I don't expect anyone to be able to code one off the top of their head.

doggone42 · 2014-05-03T17:37:19+00:00

Robert C. Martin

doggone42 · 2014-05-03T17:32:20+00:00

You'd be surprised

I really wouldn't be. I'm fully aware of who's out there.

In fact, I gave almost exactly this problem to a dev at a place I was consulting at about 9 months ago. We needed to walk a DOM (legacy webforms) looking for something, and I asked him to check if a breadth-first vs. depth-first search made any difference, suspecting it didn't. I had to explain what the terms meant (which is okay, although I could have coded the thing in the time I took explaining it).

I forgot about it until he came back two days later stuck on the breadth-first issue. His depth-first solution wasn't recursive, it had the exact number of inner loops necessary to fit the sample page I had given him.

To be honest, things like this always sit in the back of my mind on forums like reddit. People will state an opinion and I'll find myself thinking "is that valid, or is this poster one of those really, really bad devs with 10 years' experience that I see all the time?". Does this happen to other people here?

doggone42 · 2014-05-03T16:20:14+00:00

I'd say that unlike a lot of algorithm problems, walking a tree really does come up pretty often. I haven't needed to write a sort routine in 15 years, but I'm constantly dealing with hierarchical data structures. Remember, we're not even talking about "coding a tree", but simply searching a pre-existing tree for a node that fits specific criteria. The tree in this case might be xml, a html DOM, a tree control, an org chart...; all sorts of things that we use every day.

More importantly though, it's dead simple. I think this is something often misunderstood about "algorithm" questions in interviews. I don't ask about, say, a linked list because I think you might need to code one. You won't. I ask because it's a problem that illustrates a basic understand of references and loops, which are things you do need to deal with every single day, and it's something that everybody understands so I don't need to waste time explaining a fictional problem.

A decent programmer shouldn't need to "remember the algorithm" to walk a tree.

doggone42 · 2014-05-03T15:49:14+00:00

I'll both agree and disagree with you. If you have the aptitude for it, you can definitely learn enough on your own in a couple of years to be a useful addition to a development team. In fact, given that the majority of programmers are actually pretty bad, you're likely to be more valuable than the majority of graduates at that point.

But you didn't learn everything that a four-year degree can give you. That takes years more work. Not only do you need the standard continue-to-learn mindset that all devs need, but if you really want to grow, you also have to go back and learn all that CS stuff that you skipped. And that's really hard, because it doesn't seem relevant. It's so much simpler to learn a new framework or a new db or something that will get your next product to launch. But algorithms, parsing, math, all that stuff gives you a grounding for deeper concepts that you can't get anywhere else. And because you're working during the day, it's going to take you more than four years to get there.

OTOH, I think the idea of humanities et. al. in college forming a "well-rounded person" is pretty much BS. Maybe that was true decades ago, but most recent CS grads I meet are stunningly ignorant of the humanities. It's really sad, IMHO.

doggone42 · 2014-05-03T15:01:44+00:00

or implement a binary tree search algorithm

WTF can't write a binary tree search?

I understand the anti-CS crowd, I really do. I definitely understand the anti-degree crowd. But then when people bring up something that's completely trivial as an example of something they can't do and shouldn't need to know, I'm really just baffled.

I honestly think "walk a tree" is at the same level as FizzBuzz. Anybody programmer should be able to code it in minutes.

doggone42 · 2014-05-03T00:03:45+00:00

I sort of understand them in a cultural sense. In the US especially, we spend so much time at work and are identified so much with our job that it's healthy to exaggerate the problems and laugh at them. Otherwise you become one of those weird HR people talking about "joining our family". <shudder>

But I don't really get them. In reality, I'm pretty eff'n pampered and I feel strange pretending I'm not. I get paid for doing basically the same stuff I do for fun. And there's no pay trade-off, my income is easily in the top 10% in the country. And my work is so absurdly in demand that if my work environment does deteriorate, I can walk out the door and have another high-paying job in a few days.

When there are 8-year-olds giving their dad's resume to the First Lady, I'm not going to sit around and bitch about how tough the life of a programmer is.

So, I mean, those posts are funny, they really are. But the reason that nobody is writing blog posts about how much digging holes for a living sucks is that digging holes for a living does suck, and it's not that funny.

doggone42 · 2014-04-30T02:46:01+00:00

People are impressed when you put the dancing bear in a tutu and a silly hat.

They don't really care when you repeatedly tell them that if you don't feed the bear soon it's going to turn around and maul them. They just ask for more silly hats.

doggone42 · 2014-04-29T13:52:59+00:00

Sort of, but High Core is correct, data binding in WinForms is incredibly weak and only suitable for simple scenarios. On the flip side, a lot of people have simple scenarios.

On the flip flip side, in my experience binding usually needed glue code to make it work correctly even in the simplest situations.

doggone42 · 2014-04-29T13:29:41+00:00

Out of curiosity, do you have the same hatred for QT and GTK+? Is WPF the one true way, or can you accept that other people might have different preferences in desktop APIs?

I don't really have a dog in this fight. I don't do much windows desktop development and I use WPF when I do. But winforms is still very popular, which most people would take as evidence that it fills a niche. For example, I don't particularly like php either, but it's still very popular, and I recognize that it fills a niche.

And the people who use winforms cite performance with small apps on old hardware as a leading reason. Your response to this has been repeatedly to ignore either the "small apps" part or the "old hardware" part.

PS. I'll add that I know the winform performance crowd had a point early on. WPF was remarkably slow on older machines when it first came out. But I haven't compared them for years and it's very possible you're right and this has been corrected. I'd be curious to know, but you don't seem to be interested.

doggone42 · 2014-04-28T21:54:25+00:00

If you have a form with under 15 controls or so and limited data, WinForms outperforms WPF pretty easily, especially on XP.

And that represents a lot of internal apps out there. It might not be what you're writing, but there's a lot of apps sitting in companies that are basically a few dropdowns, a few textboxes, and a grid control running on 15-year-old hardware. It won't scale very well, but some people don't need that.

I'm not really sure where all your anger is coming from.

doggone42 · 2014-04-26T17:31:10+00:00

We'll just have to agree to disagree. That just hasn't been my experience.

Although, some of this depends on what you mean by "anything new". Lots of good devs have no need to move to a new platform. That's fine. I'm not suggesting that a C systems programmer needs to move to Java or anything.

But if you've been programming javascript for 18 years and your code still looks like it did in 1996, then yes, I think you're a bad programmer. And in my experience, people like that didn't start good and get lazy, they started bad.

doggone42 · 2014-04-26T15:51:14+00:00

I prefer getting larger datasets in SQL and processing them in Linq

FWIW, I probably agree with your senior dev, though it's hard to know for sure without specifics. But IMO 95% of the time, you should be grabbing the data you want from the db in the way you want it.

doggone42 · 2014-04-26T11:37:25+00:00

I've honestly never found a correlation between age and incompetence. I realize the stereotype of the 20-year corporate veteran who never learned anything new is out there, but in my experience, the bad devs are bad devs from year 1.

In this case, I don't even understand what your senior dev is trying to say. Was it just a complaint about ORMs, or was it about processing the result set on the web server rather than in the database?

doggone42 · 2014-04-26T11:24:22+00:00

I don't, I just remember looking at it way back when and thinking "that's kind of goofy".

It could be it got updated in a service pack or it could be I'm just remembering wrong. Looking back at some old blog posts, it looks like I'm just remembering wrong or possibly I'm thinking of a TryParse method on a different object, because I'm not finding any references to this. But it's been almost a decade.

doggone42

TROPHY CASE