Where have all the hackers gone?

> I think the reason, plain and simple, is that most developers aren't really in it for the passion anymore, but rather the money.

This site is a prime example. There can't be a post about a non-mainstream programming language without someone's comment saying "I don't get the point of this, it is really hard to hire for/it would be really hard to pick up for junior developers."

It seems every small project, library, language is evaluated in the context of the average FAANG developer, or whether it would fit in a startup environment. Hacking, as in enjoying the art of programming computers, is going the way of the dodo, especially on this site. The few remaining hackers are massively outranked by the "I only know Javascript" average dev, the Silicon Valley-adjacent MBAs and the huge number of those that somehow are here just to post and comment about non-programming topics.

On the rare occasion there's a post on Lisp or software-defined radios, for example, you often see the same faces. It seems that on here, the nucleus of hackers has remained more or less constant since 2010, while all other demographics flooded in.

As an average hacker, I must say that I don't give a rat's arse anymore about most mainstream programming topic you can find on this site's front page.

This is very astute.

I'd like to add that the pipeline for child/adolescent hackers that existed in the pre-00s is basically non-existent. The only major path that still exists that I can think of is game modding.

I'm a third-generation techie on both sides of my family (my paternal grandpa (b. ~1915) got started working with TVs and their mechanical parts and my maternal grandmother (b. mid 1920s) learned C in the 70s) and there are several parts of my upbringing that I don't think could be replicated. For instance, I got started with web work in the 90s, which meant that a.) nobody knew what they were doing and the lack of formal structure combined with the cultural appreciation for competence meant that children could do 'real' work and I loved helping with 'real' work and b.) there was no age limit to participation and no legal liability since most of it wasn't commercial.

There were also child-specific parts of the Web that were built by actual children instead of corporations meant to siphon money from parents. A large draw was being able to act without needing adult intermediaries. I could make a website about Sailor Moon or toys or start a chat/IRC room and control the discussions I had and kick adults or anybody who was inappropriate. (10 year olds are great dictators).

There are almost no pathways into tech now that revolve around tech as play and I think that's where a lot of hackers came from.

Also: potential hackers might never really form into hackers because there’s a strong career path and financial incentive to work on big boring software engineering using the same skills

That’s actually the exact same story of how I ended up in computer science instead of pure mathematics. I was interested in pure logic and set theory, but I could flex the same muscles learning programming language theory and end up with much better odds of paying off student loans by the time I’m 30

People only have so much time in life. If I could enjoy my work 30% more that would be great. Is it worth making less than half income though?

There are just a lot more programmers today. All the same hackers and stuff who used to be there are still there, but there's a lot more of everyone else.

If Harvard started admitting 50,000 students a year, the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find.

Current culture of squeezing every bit of productivity out of programmers is absolute cancer. In many companies practices like scrum actively discourage spending more time on research / refactoring. "Of course you can spend some time on this task! Also you have the other five to complete. And the sprint ends in two weeks".

Imagine Einstein was told "oh, you have such a nice idea about relativity, let's time frame it to 2 days, and then get back to reviewing patents"

(Can only speak for myself). I’ve a bit of a hacker. To be honest lately, I just find the languages I know are so nice and powerful (enough) that I spend time building interesting and cool things (a AC power flow solver; a networked 3D roguelike game) than hacking around with new shiny languages.

Basically I just really like TypeScript. Languages I’ve worked with or tried out for the pure hackery spirit of exploration: assembly, C, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, Clojure(script), Lisp, Elm, C# (did lots of neat stuff with that, thanks Unity!), PHP, scala, go, Pascal, VB, probably a couple more I forget. More tech stacks than I can think of.

FOR ME, TypeScript is just so good for what I want to do that I just don’t want to mess about with other tools or “spend innovation tokens”. I just wanna build stuff!

I think two factors matter: lack of housing and shift to service sector. The lack of housing forces people to prioritize money, just Maslow's hierarchy. Because many jobs now involve sitting at a computer screen for 60 hours a week, not many (healthy/sane) people who want to add even more hours at the computer on top of their 60 hour a week 9to5, or 7to7, or whatever most people now work).

I think the hacker culture of the ‘90s to early ‘00s is behind us, and it really saddens me. I’ve yet to find a corner of the current tech / startup landscape that ignites the same excitement I felt over a decade ago. It’s too commercial now.

I tried to read through all the direct replies to this comment and I didn’t see this (apologies if I missed it).

There’s a huge component of this that’s worth recognizing:

—

The current legal landscape and lack of anonymity makes most hacking a non-starter

—

In the early days someone could explore really far as long as they didn’t call up a government agency or try to steal property. They could play pranks, hook up Rube-Goldberg call chains that circumnavigated the planet, break apart any hardware they owned and assemble it in to anything else, dig in to the binary of any file on a computer, rip apart the memory of any process, post the results in a magazine or even collaborate openly online.

And most of the world had no idea. The only time they got in trouble was when authorities saw something they didn’t like and even then most of the time they had no laws to leverage (there are some significant notable examples that got the book thrown at them but those were outliers).

Now?

Now you can be retroactively targeted for making an emulator for a decades-old game system.

Or sharing a single piece of copyrighted content.

Or getting close breaking to the DMCA.

Or (insert wacky future laws here).

The risk is extremely high and the rules are way too thorny. Working for a company means you’re going to have clear guidelines about what you can and can’t use and therefore protection from the worst of the legal minefield that is the US. It also means you have a cushion for if/when you’re targeted.

Does anyone know how many true hackers are growing up right now who have already taken their first steps at learning and who have had their posts wiped from the internet or their inboxes “graced” with cease and desist letters (or worse), or their accounts outright terminated? I don’t think there even is a way to know.

How many of those kids would be crazy enough to keep being public, and how many of those would learn enough through private self-discovery that they can significantly contribute to the hacking scene as adults?

> I think the reason, plain and simple, is that most developers aren't really in it for the passion anymore, but rather the money.

Anecdata:

I had a job recently that paid competitively, but the boss soon replaced interesting work with boring work (for me: writing boilerplate that's already been solved a thousand times over, or any FE work), so my passion petered out, which was quite obvious to everyone involved, so the relationship ended.

However, I'm with a client now, and we're building something really cool (using LLMs; I get access to H100 soon; etc) and I'm working every spare minute I can get away with, without being paid for overtime.

I feel like a "hacker" again with this role, learning new things, stretching the capabilities of the system given various constraints, and every second link I open in my browser is arxiv.

(That said, I grew up in South Africa, where cyber laws lagged behind the world's for a good few years, so we knew every trick in the book, yet were untouchable, haha!)

> I think the reason, plain and simple, is that most developers aren't really in it for the passion anymore, but rather the money.

Tho, people you call hackers fairly often do not actually like actual work involved in actually doing the programming work. They like tinkering with technology, reading about it, but they do not like creating and maintaining software.

And fairly often, people dismissed by hackers as not passionate, because they are using boring technology, are passionate about actually finishing functional software.

> Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common?

I think that hackers are still around -- I see them a lot -- but they aren't as publicly visible anymore. They aren't interested in making money, and so they won't be in most mainstream technical fora (including HN), because of the cultural shift that made chasing dollars the main thing.

But they are in more private fora, and they get together in person (at conventions, hackerspaces, etc.).

I don't think the hacker community has grown smaller, but I think most of the web has changed so that it's not as appealing to people who want to talk hacker stuff.

All of which is to say -- like when people ask what happened to the old web, back when it was actually good -- they're still there, but they're harder to see in the increasingly dense forest of commercially-minded places.

> However, as the idea of "programming makes money" became more well known, and bootcamps + college both upped their game, more and more people started coding just with the hopes to make money. To get good enough to make money, not care about "huh, how does the bootloader actually work" or "Why did chrome just crash, let me open up gdb...".

To me, bootcamps are a complete red flag when considering candidates. I don't think I ever saw a single good hire out of a bootcamp (and we just flat out stopped interviewing them at one point because the signal to noise ratio just became too low).

The stakes are much higher now with new security methods like Zero Trust around. On vital systems, logs aren't stored directly on the same infrastructure as host infra... That means more footprints that can snitch on a hacker, and the penalties are much higher for hacking offenses because so much more is riding on key systems now... Mitnick got a job instead of jail... That won't really happen now because there are simply too many wildly different frameworks. It also explains why most breaches are state sponsored, well funded, wide scale, and from overseas... ;\

People are hacking social media a lot for growth and money, but the best secrets are very illusive and flooded out by lies, novice content, boilerplate advice, and outright scams... The actual hackers quietly scrape pennies off of the net in micro-transactions until they start racking up as thousands of dollars, most of the time though it's heavily coordinated group activity rather than the lone kid in his parent's house like it used to be... The hacker kid now is too busy shilling crypto scams, playing video games, revving stonks, or working on yet another GPT tool that no one really needs IMO. :P

I think it's more about the culture and circle you are in. When you are in education, first starting out, or in irc/slack support channels, you're much more likely to see people with more passion about the technology. If you're in an office or working on a team in an established business it's much more about getting the work done.

Beyond this, priorities shift over time. The priorities of someone in their early 20's that is single will be different than someone in their late 40's with children heading towards college, or even younger children. As you mention, there's also the boot camps and people that simply come in without interest in the technology aspects.

In the end, there's many more people that will get into the gritty details today than decades ago, but there's also many more people that are more concerned about getting work done. This is part of why entropy is really hard to overcome. Trying to get movement in a company towards a new approach can be very hard. If company X is using Java or C#, their developers have likely been using it for many years, know it well and don't see a reason to shift. And for the most part, they are right. You can get work done in many languages, scale and adapt in many ways. Most applications don't even need to scale that much. Most apps are line of business apps that only a few dozen people ever even see and for those that aren't, you can scale vertically quite a bit before you really need to go horizontal.

It's different if you re starting something public facing and want to utilize newer tooling for horizontal scale from the start. Aside: Why CockroachLabs doesn't expose a web api for database queries directly for the likes of Cloudflare Workers or Deno Deploy is beyond me... In the end, it depends on what market you're serving. Getting something working means far more than an optimal approach in one way or aother.

My suspicion is it boils down to maturity and scope of the domain. When it is brand-new, one guy can change the world in his garage in a few months. As it matures, you start to need large teams to build the next incredible thing. Even if you are passionate and ambitious, tinkering in your garage simply will not allow you to realize your vision. So you join a large company where you can.

Random datapoint, everyone I knew who was deeply passionate about compilers seemed to be going to work for Apple for a while. They could have written a new research compiler in their basement - but Apple is where LLVM was happening.

Yeah I think you nailed it. I think there's also different levels of hacker culture. I couldn't tell you a thing about golang's GC, but as a young kid I was absolutely fascinated by computers and learning at such an extreme pace. I was much more of a hacker type than I am now. And much of that is because I had basically unlimited time to learn. And you had to have a passion for it because there was typically no one to help you back then. Some of the stuff I coded as a kid I would struggle to make even now!

Part of reason why I started my Substack DeusInMachina is because I felt like my coworkers weren’t as into programming, and technology as I was. More of a clock in clock out thing for them. Which is totally fine except I actually felt really lonely about wanting to geek out about AI, Niche programming languages, and programmer culture, but not having anyone to talk to

I'd echo this. I'd also add (perhaps prematurely as a gen-z) that I see a lot less playfulness when it comes to side-projects. Rather, it seems projects start with monetary or career motives. Nothing wrong with this, but I'd like to see more fun!

oh yes.

there's enormous pressure to be normal. being weird is... like... someone's going to be uploading video of you and mocking you.

there's also the thing where its more expensive to have a normal life, financial pressures say "do financial things". like... the us world is shaping to be "high road" qua Stewart Brand whereas hackers thrive in "low road" environments.

there's also sort of this ... how do I say it ... hackers & that legendary online culture was sort of a product of a people without obligations. seeing your kids soccer game is much more important than debugging a program for fun. being monks for code & computers is not culturally sustainable.

I'm a new (and young) hacker and I agree with what you are saying.

Are there any communities and/or forums of people who are passionate about building and hacking purely for the sake of passion that I can join?

i think there's always going to be a bell curve of programmers: say those in the pocket on the left are interested in the "soil" as the author put it

as the total number of programmers grows, so too does the pocket, but at a smaller rate than the rest of the bell

so, numbers-wise, yes, there will be fewer hackers per average programmer. it becomes harder to find them too, since most people will probably spend most of their time swimming around the middle of the curve

but i think their number overall is still increasing. just have to grit your teeth and jump to discord to find them :)

> often become less hacker due to life slowly grinding them down.

AKA just getting older

We've seen this historically with other technologies. There was a short-lived era when people knew how to repair cars. To tune and modify engines. But as automobiles became ever more of a commodity, that population seemed to shrink too.

It may be difficult for a child to become fascinated with a particular technology once it becomes ubiquitous. It's a testable hypothesis too, because if that were true then you should see hackers appear in different geographic regions at different times due to how unevenly these technologies are distributed.

The confounding factor, I think, for computer technology at least, is that by the time they become ubiquitous in the third world, they may no longer be simple enough to "get started" on.

>When I first started coding, I didn't get paid. I didn't think I ever would.

How did you make a living?

Exactly this. No one cares anymore, they just want $$$

> Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes around hackers being less common?

I've seen it as well.

I don't agree with what the author says are reasons for it. They just don't fit.

From what I've seen, hackers (in the truest sense) don't advertise. They have deep knowledge, but you only find how deep when you get into discussions with them, and most of the time they have no goodwill to engage in that because of two things, people who are dunning kruger; and social media.

Many of the learning paths have also been removed and are harder to find, the internet used to be freer than it is now. You have companies that dictate what stays up simply by using the court system as a coercive measure. The recent Quad9 thing shows just how bad this is getting across the board internationally. Copyright is being used to coerce, compulse, and limit actual innovation.

Hackers used to get by with their skills via certifications and jobs, many times they can't get certified now that only a single company handles testing in most places. I can't tell you specifically how they fail you, but its certainly not based upon whether you just have the knowledge.

The number of real hackers out there are significantly less because there has been less opportunity, and less resources that are easily found to get into it.

Many have worked very hard for their knowledge and some volunteer and help others, but there's an active trend to harass those that contribute like that, and volunteer psychology says you stop giving when it starts costing you. Dealing with a high number of deceitful people leads you to test them before providing any goodwill. If the hacker's don't like what your response implies they don't engage, and you are none the wiser.

Its not about life grinding them down, there are a lot of intelligent people who have stopped giving back because they see what providing that support is doing for society in general, its going in a direction that will inevitably fail because life will be intolerable, and volunteering is at a much higher cost to them personally than it ever was before.

Its like that adage that most people know, what you do in small things that don't matter shows what you will do in large things that matter. If you lie cheat and steal in friendly games, do you want them managing your company's finances? A smart person wouldn't.

There are also a lot of crazies out there that are really indoctrinated now too and they don't even realize it. They like the idea of something, but ignore everything else that would be needed to make it work. Completely irrational in some cases and can't even reason or think critically. Its sad.

The description of this interaction in the article makes me sad for the author - they criticise and belittle another. Imagine instead what they could have learnt if they opened themselves up to another persons perspective.

It’s notable how little this article actually discusses the delivery of any form of value. The tech is not the end in itself, it’s a means to an end - and we live in an age with so many well matured and valid options that for many of the problems we seek to solve what tech we use isn’t necessarily a critical decision.

The author answers their own question - where have the hackers gone? We are getting on with it and building stuff. This kind of language flame war stuff just isn’t as important as it once (debatably) was. It’s a dying trope.

Thinking on the initial mistake our author made - framing the conversation rigidly through their own frame of reference - I’ve personally found Matthew Syed’s work on cognitive diversity helpful in understanding and addressing this. [1]

[1] https://graphic-designer-richmond.co.uk/2021/01/business-boo...

I don’t agree. My perception is that the author doesn’t think “atmosphere” discussions about programming languages are of less value, it’s just an example to segue into the classification of “soil, surface, and atmosphere” as types of programming language considerations, and off of that the observation that the past decade has shifted significantly to “atmosphere” as the most important aspect for safe, boring software engineering (which is the actual primary topic of the article)

None of that is to imply the friend is wrong or inferior in some way

You don't know what the other person really wanted or thought - and neither did the author, apparently. The breakdown in communication here is that you, and the author, had certain expectations, assumptions, and unknown information, and you both made conclusions based on all that variable, unknowable, uncommunicated stuff.

Rather than assume what's going on in the other person's head, ask them. Assume good faith until evidence to the contrary. It allows less judgement and negativity, which leads to more fruitful conversation.

I agree, the recount of that interaction had major "Oh you love X? Name every Y.[1]" Vibes

1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oh-you-love-x-name-every-y

This very much read like the comic book guy of programmers to me.

I like this take. Good luck being a “hacker” when the webpack config takes 2 days for a pro and a week for a novice. The programming landscape is far more complex.

This rings true. Widespread existential dread of "am I investing / have I invested in the correct niche since I can't learn it all" feels like a logical progression.

The cambrian explosion is happening within subfields too (e.g. AI -- everyone is a specialist within a specialty).

It occurs to me that if you buy into the concept that there are "posers" and also "the real deal", then the first thing the posers should do is start whining about "gatekeeping" and how awful it is. It's just the best strategy considering their lack of merit. If the terminology "gatekeeping" hasn't been invented yet, then it would be strategic to invent that word.

>Sorry if this is off-topic but I often see in HN (either in articles posted here, or in the comments) lack of empathy.

You are absolutely correct. This place is populated with quite a few nerds. Nerds typically have subpar social skills, which is is both fueled by and results in a lack of empathy.

>"I ♥ people; look for ways to make them happy, and empower them."

The propaganda arm of the Soviets is called "Pravda", which means "truth". It's like people who say "I'm such a nice guy", "I'm very humble", or this author saying "I love people and my friend" but then they talk shit about their friend in this very article.

Listen not to what someone says, observe what they do. "Actions speak louder than words" and all that.

Yeah-- that's always been the case in more technical crowds from my experience. I switched to HN from Slashdot like a decade ago because the Slashdot crowd seemed to get overrun with folks like that.

Recently, I most frequently notice it when people discuss potential job losses from AI automation. Regardless of whether or not this is good for society, it's absolutely bizarre how many folks around here (and some other places, like related subreddits,) gleefully dance on the grave of artists of all people. Some seem to disdain creatives wanting to participate in our economy using their hard-won skills and vocation, almost as if their doing so is oppressive to non-artists. Others seem to think it appropriate to act like they've just beaten them in a game. The majority of folks around here seem to act pretty reasonably about it but that vocal minority is obnoxious, to say the least.

Accuracy of their predictions aside, it's just a disgusting way to talk about people whose careers, they imagine, were just unexpectedly flushed down the toilet through no fault of their own. Unsurprisingly, these people usually have the least sophisticated, and least useful philosophical understanding of what art is. I imagine this is a cognitive limitation directly related to their empathic limitations.

You can absolutely have friends that you have unfruitful conversations with. The idea that every interaction needs to be positive to constitute friendship is extremely unhealthy and sterilizing.

I don't think I'd personally be offended by those bits. People have different focuses! Sometimes conversations aren't fruitful! I'm ok with that.

But I do think there's a lack of empathy displayed in his strong value judgments. His "here are the different things people think about" breakdown is interesting. But there's a flavor of "and these specific people are bad and wrong" here that I don't like. I think he should have kept going to "and here's why they focus on those things" with the same amount of appreciation.

Hi! Author here. This is fair; I can see how you feel this way from the article. That said, "I suspect he didn't know or think much about them" isn't a value judgement on him; just as I didn't care much about his point on `for` loops, we all have things we care about more and less about than others. Same with "fruitful conversation" — I meant that for both of us! I think both of us could have had a better time.

I'll try to be more mindful in the future, but I think "the original characterization doesn't trash him" is defensible. If he sees the blog and thinks its unfair, he's perfectly able to reach out (we're not actually very close). I make it clear we value different things but I never explicitly say "this guy sucks" _because I don't believe that._ He's a fantastic dev who's built great systems, but I wish we had a better framework for chatting about Golang.

Edit: I've updated the language with a few more details to better reflect how that whole interaction went down, which was a playful chat between two seasoned devs with ~12 companies between them. I didn't want to spend too much of the article on the anecdote, so I originally cut out some surrounding context (he was excited to "get into it," it's not like I just came at him when he said "I like Go").

How is that supposed friend, who might very well be aware of this person's blog, going to feel after reading this?

In Spanish there's a saying, la confianza da asco, that could be translated more or less as "familiarity sucks". You often treat your friends and family worse than you would to strangers. It also means that if a good friend doesn't talk truth to you, who will?

I think it's perfectly okay if my friends think they had an unfruitful conversation with me and thought that I didn't know what I was talking about. I don't like rubber-stamp people who just say whatever I want to hear and have no depth of their own and aren't willing to disagree on anything.

In fact, I really can't stand when I talk to someone and they seem to agree unconditionally with everything I say; it's not believable. Surely they disagree, why can't they express their feelings? Why is no one willing to go on a limb and be wrong or criticized? I find it particularly prevalent in the tech circles, when talking to parents of other kids in the SF Bay area. Everything is very picture perfect, and I can't believe it, so I feel I can't trust the people speaking. They're too nice, too polished.

I like my friends who will disagree with me (most of the time respectfully) and allow me to say stupid things and forgive me for my imperfections, and equally for theirs.

Right? As he explains, there are many different hierarchies of critiquing a programming language. Yet, they heavily imply if you care about “surface” topics, your feelings aren’t as valid as if you were more interested in the garbage collector.

It's an interesting notion that you can't disagree or find faults in your friends, especially if we adapt the Anglophone definition of a friend as a loose sorta sustained contact. Would people rush to criticizing in this manner if someone truthfully wrote that their friend has problems hauling 20 kg weights up four floors of stairs?

The description is undiplomatic, could be written in a more roundabout way, but this could be read as even more haughty and rude. I'd say that as human collectives we need to maintain a grip on reality, and it is wasteful and dangerous to live in a web of polite lies.

I'm maybe not as offended as you because I think his friend is more mature and should be proud they avoided being baited.

The GC being preemptive might be part of a group choice at selection time, whether the language is painful to read and/or write is a permanent factor in your quality of life at work until you eventually move to another project.

Of course whether they are not emphatic enough is more a matter of whether the author sees it as a criticism of their friend.

I think a lot of people have these kind of discussions behind people’s backs. I’ve certainly done it.

Who hasn’t occasionally mentioned to one friend how another friend annoyed you?

On the other hand, it’s not something you do in public. I’d be just a tad upset this person didn’t tell me how they felt and instead told everyone but me.

Decades ago, my group of close friends made a pact: if anyone of us is talking shit, talking nonsense, or simply expressing attitude that smells of self deception, do not let it lie and declare it is time for a reality debate. Friends should never let friends descend into self deception, because that slippery slope can kill, as well as sour everything one experiences. Others seeing us in the midst of a reality debate would often form little crowds. If you ever witnessed the "pseudo intellectual club" debates at the Boston Pour House during the late 80's, that was us. That group of close friends is long dispersed into the winds, several still keep in touch, and it is that 'reality debate' activity we continually return, and debate the state of the world.

I wish my friends were this honest and blunt. I acknowledge that the friends I keep would almost certainly disagree though.

The normal (at least in Canada) seems to be as you suggest. I'm perfectly ok with being the weird one though.

The tech world might not be as empathetic as some other human endeavors, but it has a unique approach.

We need to consider whether we should foster more empathy or simply adapt to the existing landscape. Being practical and discerning, sometimes to the point of discrimination, has proven effective in areas like space exploration, business, and even the natural process of evolution. And tech, too. Over the past 30 years, the tech industry has achieved remarkable feats, feats that would seem magical to people living a century ago. This success stems from swiftly testing new ideas and people, and discriminating between those who can deliver results and those who cannot.

However, such judgment or discrimination can pose problems. While it might be beneficial in natural systems, facilitating improvement, it isn't perceived positively in our society. We aim for fairness and equality for everyone. The term "discriminate", even though integral to nature and many productive systems, often carries a negative connotation in sociology. And indeed when we look at examples of unfairness and inequality in history, they are generally seen as immoral. But I wonder if that is because the inequality was often means to an end for someone else's decadence.

Here's a difficult question: should tech become more empathetic or continue to discriminate based on ability? If we become less judgmental of skills, we might not achieve as much. If we continue to be unempathetic, that will cause social friction. While I don't have a definitive answer, it's certainly worth considering.

In my tentative opinion (since I don't feel particularly adamant about it), we should continue assessing individuals based on their technical understanding in the tech realm, but within reason. We need to maintain humility, recognizing our limited knowledge and potential to misjudge others. Our critiques should be measured, and we should avoid letting our assessments of others' technical skills cloud our perception of their worth in other areas. After all, one can possess excellent personal attributes yet lack technical skills or be unfit for a specific tech project. In that sense, I lean more heavily towards the fundamentally non-empathetic approach. But that's just N=1. The important part of my message here is that we need to acknowledge the equity/empathy-effectiveness trade-off and be conscious of it.

> How is that supposed friend, who might very well be aware of this person's blog, going to feel after reading this?

Friends are people you can talk like this about and they are still your friend afterwards.

> How is that supposed friend, who might very well be aware of this person's blog, going to feel after reading this?

Don't worry. The friend is probably imaginary just for the story.

That fits exactly with non-fruitfulness. A discussion about programming languages became a discussion about someone's empathy.

The entire point of Go is that it's designed for less talented programmers, i.e. people who can't understand or don't want to put in the effort to understand those things.

That's the whole appeal of many programming languages, they massively simplify the mental model (for a price).

I've been a lot happier and more productive since I switched to a slow language (which younger me would have been sad to hear).

that's your take away from this? so tired of hearing about the e word, and all this therapy talk in business/tech world. "psychological safety" and "vulnerability" (not related to security unfortunately) are two others that make constant rounds among the management caste. i instantly cringe when someone starts talking about this crap at work. please, just focus on your job.

It could be an aspect of undiagnosed or unmedicated ADHD. ADHA applies more broadly than just states of focus and includes social conditions that when the ADHD is advanced can mimic behaviors commonly thought of autistic. One of those impaired social behaviors can include empathy development. Please note this does not apply to most cases of ADHD and seems to apply in cases that are more pronounced.

One key indicator of whether impaired empathy is the result of ADHD is that everything tends to be communicated as either starting from or directly referring to the person forming the communication almost as if narcissistic, but not necessarily with a selfishness intent.

Having worked with Scala I disagree it’s a safe choice. Scala is a huge, complicated, difficult language built on the huge (but very powerful) JVM. It’s also hard to hire Scala devs AND hard to train non Scala devs to write Scala, because it’s not a language you can learn in a weekend. (Speaking from experience)

> I think writing a program that's more than ~10k lines of code in Golang is a mistake

isn't Kubernetes mostly Go? Just sounds like an arbitrary limit. I say that when I try to limit shell scripts to a single-scroll in editor.

> Who the fuck wants to talk about the Golang GC just because you have a Golang shirt on?

ummmm me

(I mean I hate Go but in a hypothetical world where I liked Go, me)

> wants to talk about the Golang GC just because you have a Golang shirt on?

If I see someone wearing a political t-shirt, they're clearly virtue signaling. If I ask them about it, I might expect political slogans, but often they won't even be able to manage those slogans, much less explanation of a party platform.

If I see someone wearing a branded beer shirt, they're likely to be able to represent for their shirt-beer. Most of the time I'd only expect advertising slogans, but once in a while maybe they'll have something interesting to say. They're going to be generally more informed than the political shirt crew.

A programming language t-shirt is much more niche and advertises that the wearer has an interest in that language and wants the world to know about it. This goes far beyond the virtue signaling of the political shirt crowd. If all they can do is repeat slogans (like most of the beer-shirt-wearers), I'd be disappointed, too.

I think that’s a little harsh. I honestly think the anecdote at the beginning was shoehorned in as some kind of clumsy attempt to add personality. But the dirt/surface/air framework seems useful to me.

Someone having an opinion on how it feels to write in a language rather than objective facts about how it works? Blasphemy!

This blog post was very painful to read without suffering second hand embarrassment.

But presumably there is also more competition for jobs using popular technologies?

Perhaps the more important metric is supply of devs relative to demand. The top paying languages, according to the Stack Overflow's 2022 survey, are generally less popular: Clojure, Erlang, F#, LISP are the top 4. While certainly not an ideal metric (e.g., perhaps salaries are skewed due to more senior devs using these languages), this hints that the demand is certainly there relative to supply as companies are willing to pony up some decent cash for these devs.

Hey, author here, and generally a fan of your contributions here. I'd love your feedback if you're up for sharing it.

To me it seems like pretty good breakdown from a seasoned professional. I'm a bit taken aback by your take. For one thing, one of the points he's making seemed to me to be "be language agnostic".

> Like, the people who say that they can’t work for a manager unless the manager could do their job!

I've worked in IT for over 25 years. Other than a CTO or senior tech executive reporting to CEO, I have seen problems with technical people reporting to non-technical people that I never see with technical people reporting to, if not technical people, at least formerly technical people. A technical manager can have problems of their own, but why enter a new class of problems that don't exist otherwise.

Why would I work somewhere where my boss is effectively a PM?

Which secret society has seen 4 decades of "it it breathes and codes, it's hired" business climate with hundreds of billions of dollars behind? It's not like anyone wanted for the September to last for eternity, it just had to happen given the situation.

In some ways things are a lot harder. In the early 90s I was able to borrow Turbo C from my brother. He gave me a pointer to video memory and I could use math to draw stuff. I was making stuff in a few minutes.

No, you don't require those things. If you're using the proper primitives, they literally can't hog 100% of the server CPU. In fact, the default concurrency primitives in the BEAM/Go do not hog 100% of the CPU, meaning you literally have to go out of your way to fuck it up.

This makes a difference, and means you do not require queues for properly silo'd background tasks.

I completely disagree with your claims here. Communicating about your work, your discoveries, your work is one of the aspects of being an engineer. Developing and maintaining a blog takes work. Grinding out code alone is not productive, nor is it a long term successful way of achieving anything in this industry.

My take of this situation is that people are overworked, and community has become overly regulated, unrewarded, and suppressed. (Language/tone policing, spam, aggressive individuals encouraged in groups, bad group membership policies [CoCs used as bullying devices more than simple rules to follow], dev advocates stepping on everything)

I don't know. Syntax and Semantic are pretty much both Surface in this metaphor. The "Soil" seems more like the Environment/OS, while the "Atmosphere" is also the OS? Maybe I'm just throwing wrenches

But yea, maybe we can't have a PL conversation without also having a conversation about our own language? Ugh

It's more like: soil = runtime, surface = language, runtime = community.

> Many people do not get it, they are always like "you can learn langs after your first within a month" or so

In my experience: half a year minimum, and only after your 10th. The amount of uninteresting trivia that you need to wade through on your way to concepts you already know is vast, much greater than you'd remember from 10 years back when you learned your previous language. More then 10 languages I already know do help, in that I can easily pick up any language in a matter of days, but... that's only if we're talking about the language[1]. Developing a skill in using that language, including absorbing the specific culture (books read, talks given, whose blogs to read, which Discord/Slack/#freenode to visit, and so on) and learning the details of the ecosystem (from stdlib to common libraries to frameworks, to the details of implementation, the FFI, and so on) and it's a lot of things to learn.

Well, at least I know that my next language will be a lot easier to learn, thanks to a revolution in the rubber duck industry, which gave us a duck that can - sometimes convincingly - pretend to understand what we're saying. And sometimes even gives you a hint that turns out to be real! Oh, the progress...

[1] As long as there's no genuinely innovative features in that language. Which, sadly, seems to be the case 95% of the time.

Throw in the fact that most programmers are terrible communicators, and we get complete nonsense non-debates that are little more than emotional cry fests.

> you don’t need to learn all of the frameworks in the TypeScript ecosystem to be productive in TypeScript

but you should hold in the back of your head a realization that your understanding of said ecosystem and the compiler is limited. Likely always will be, as there are multiple not stupid people working on it, and there's one of you.

It happened to me that I knew how to do X (and then did it) which had been boldly declared as impossible to do by the resident senior expert. I knew it not because I liked those minutiae, just was willing to dig to the bottom when solving some problem earlier. I dunno, but it's likely that both geeks who just absorb niche and arcane knowledge to feel superior and bone-minded resident experts are equally bad (and sometimes, rarely, but still, they are the same guy).

If you're writing a quick script, there's absolutely no point to caching those exceptions in Ruby—it's just going to cause your program to continue when it otherwise should have quit out due to an error condition outside of its control. Java's checked exceptions breeds overly defensive programming like this.

Anyway, here's a slightly better ruby version:

    File.readlines('file.txt').each do |line|
        puts(line)
    end

Notice also how this is much more equivalent to the Java example provided, except it also consumes the file so you don't have to worry about introducing a new syntax construct to understand how the file gets closed. (Same, incidentally, with the File.open case, which just reuses a standard ruby block instead of introducing a new magic try statement that autocloses the file). You lose laziness, but you can get it back by using File.foreach instead, at the cost of a little bit of readability

The two aren't equivalent (you're using a catchall exception handler in Ruby but not in Java, and are printing a stack trace in java but not in Ruby). Here's the equivalent Ruby:

    begin
      File.readlines('/path/to/your/file.txt').each {|line| puts line}
    rescue Errno::ENOENT => e
      puts e.backtrace
    end

Your Ruby example is unnecessarily complicated. Why not just use File.read? Why are you distinguishing two different kinds of exceptions, but not in the case of Java? And what if you don't need error handling?

haha yeah, my comment was mostly a throwback to the genre of articles we saw in the late aughts where people were discovering dynamic programming environments, and would say the line about Ruby/Java but not mention all the cases the Java case was handling that their Ruby `File.read` example didn't. I put it in quotes not to make that exact point, but more to reference how I've seen the conversation go.

Generally I'm extremely positive on Java :-p

It's preemptive, I just tested. Spawning an infinite loop inside a green-thread while limiting the program to 1 core does not freeze the program. This will output "hello" and exit normally as expected:

    package main

    import (
        "fmt"
        "runtime"
    )

    func infiniteLoop() {
        for {}
        fmt.Println("world")
    }

    func main() {
        runtime.GOMAXPROCS(1)
        go infiniteLoop()
        fmt.Println("hello")
    }

Yes, this is a mistake in the article. Go has had preemptive scheduling since Go 1.14, released at the beginning of 2020.

Hi! Thanks for posting this, it and the replies pointed out an error. I've since corrected the article.

> Kids these days want to build games

Raylib supports over 50 languages.

Hi! Have we met?

Elixir has been great for our Authorization server. I really believe in the BEAM for high-uptime cases, and love a lot about Ecto's design as an ORM. That said, I only felt comfortable bringing Elixir to Ramp because I'd already built ~3 Pheonix projects before joining, and had a decade on other Erlang projects. I make a light reference to it in a few places in the article, but I think introducing Weird Tech is very, very easy to mess up and most people would be better off not doing it.

I lead with that in my other article that made it to HN, on strategies for learning exotic tech https://morepablo.com/2022/09/so-you-re-using-a-weird-langua...

More on BEAM at Ramp and why I like it https://engineering.ramp.com/elixir-at-ramp

Me comparing/opining Ecto and SQLAlchemy, the two ORMs at Ramp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ep9CDXUHNU

It's been running Authorizations for 4 years and had remarkable good mileage.

Hi, I'm the author, and LOOOOOL Thanks for the laugh.

The universities in many to most cases do a hilariously bad job at training developers, with results all over the place and very hard to predict. How, exactly, are companies supposed to offer anything resembling the "right" training when we still practically don't know how that would look like?

Haha, Im on the similar boat

I love .NET ecosystem but it sucks that it lacks of fancy jobs that you mentioned. If you want to do compilers with C# then it feels like you have to work for C# Compiler / Roslyn Team(s)

For cool jobs there is shitton of CPP which I do think is huge mess and I hope that Rust will steal CPPs market share because my experiences with it were way way more pleasant

I've been in Agile shops since 2008, and it's the first time I'm hearing about a LoC/hour metric. Must be some sick sweatshop with micromanagers mimicking being "Agile".

Where is it making a comeback? Are people writing web and mobile apps in C?