Martin Cracauer is a fucking moron.
His Lordship the Lord Chancellor brought him up recently, because that's something he does ; and god almighty is the schmuck intolerable. Let's discuss some quotes, lest the children think this sort of inane bullshit is even remotely socially acceptable (or, god forbid, fecal matter consensus "forms", in the sense of, cures, "experts agree" bla bla bla).
The fastest development I do is hacking my Common Lisp code for my own use. This isn’t complicated, complex, or high-reaching code. It is more comparable to other people’s excel spreadsheets, except that the data isn’t tabular, it is connected graphs or trees. Some of the source code in there would look a bit wild to you, but it is just some syntax-convenienced mix of code and data (I use Lisp’s compile-time computing to quickly define the most convenient way to tell complex, irregular data to the computer in a safe manner).
I'm not even going to say anything, just leaving this here as honest self-intro by the schmuck in question, as opposed to all the dishonest ones they keep publishing. But yes, the douchebag "uses lisp" to script up the calculation of taxes, and he thinks this relevant to programming.
The reaction time from the development environment is no joke, and I stopped laughing about the 20 seconds. In psychology there is a number thrown around for a short-term attention span, or how long short-term “working” memory lasts before you reboot. It is often quoted at eight seconds[1]. That is probably more or less pulled out of thin air, however the number does not outright suck. It is in the ballpark of what I observe and I see a lot of people liking that number. My attention works differently than many other people’s attention (a common thing with software engineers), and exceeding a certain time between steps is poison for my productivity. To make matters worse — at the end of a day hacking with a slow response system I notice that I am utterly exhausted because I did it from 9:00 to 22:00 straight, even firing up a couple of runs during lunch. What’s the harm, I have so much time between results, I will have a relaxing lunch, right? At least I stopped doing it all weekend, too. And in the week after such a slow-reaction build week I see Fedex pile up a couple more guitars on my driveway, those that “my Ebay sniper won for me, not my fault”.
Leaving aside the wrong pseudoquotes this orc types in (and without apology!), and leaving aside the poisonous and outright intolerable misrelation to money and the structures of power (and therefore, responsibility) it enacts upon the world he shoves in at the end, what the fuck broken mental process even is required to produce the string "in psychology there is a number" ? Because I'll tell you right here and now how I distinguish programmers from grocery baggers, as a manageri : the sort of mind that confuses realia and idealia, such as for instance by imagining a number, which is to say an abstract, exists, in the sense of "there's a village in Sioux Lands called The United States" belongs bagging groceries. The reason magic numbers in code are such a complete giveaway of the inadequacy of the mind involved in that code's production is specifically this confusion, "there's a broom in my bathroom and a number in psychology". What fucking psychology!
How can you trust his dummkopf to produce any meaningful communication ? If he thinks numbers exist in psychology, what's to promise us he has even the faintest notion of what productivity is ? Why would I believe that when he speaks of "his productivity" he isn't speaking of cilantro ? Maybe he is ; in fact, he likely is, he just put a word he heard other people use as a label on some nonsense pre-existent in his head, and here we go, his productivity is 95 cilantro bulbs. Problem ?!
What exact fucking productivity, because the productivity in creating nonsense is unmeasurable! I imagine my productivity might well be to the tune of ten trillion words a nanosecond, if the input could be stuff like "there's a number in psychology". Heck, I have scripts deployed that almost approach that, with great results among the compatriots of Martin "Dummkopf" Cracauer, the grocery boys.
In my own environment I regularly approach change-compile-observe rates of more than 1 Hz. A cycle of typing a small amount of code, compiling it[2] (SLIME C-c C-c), running it (in the existing process instance with the big data structures ready), looking whether it did the right thing, then moving on to the next change — at a rate of more than one such cycle per second.
How can you establish whether it did the right thing in a second or less ?
This sort of inane superficiality is the exact root of the endless towers of "it seems to work" that produce all the lulz the empire is known for, from "secret agents" to "surprised by wealth", to "who could have predicted" to Debian and beyond!
That is not for high-flying code. It is for utilities. Utilities that have nothing difficult about them. You can think up those code lines as quickly as you can think of text lines for a written blog.
When I say my articles take me about 20 minutes, this means something quite altogether different than what Dummkopf has in assii here. Yes, it's quite evident he blogs the way he codes ; but no, this is no kind of praise. In fact, it's why I'm not about to read the rest of his inane shit.
The effective, real-world value of that tight OODA loop[3] is high. A working software system is the result of sitting down and typing in one working line of source code after another.
This is absolutely not fucking true, god fucking damn all these script kiddies with no formal education in any field, be it computing or fucking agriculture, and no intellectual depth at all! Fucking frogs live like this, "one line of code at a time", you understand me ? And what Martin Cracauer is, when the moment of truth comes, is a quarter pound frog emulated on well over one hundred pounds of human flesh. Mongoloids at least emulate monkeys, not fucking batracians, for the love of all that is holy.
The real world value of "a tight OODA loop" is negative, because it comes out of this equation : the value it adds for the sort of people who can write code, and who do write code, and which is fucking epsilon, meeting the value it "adds" for the sort of people who can't write code, and who only write code because "the community" "has made" "participation" "easy and painless for them" -- which is why no fucking pre-written code exists at all and we end up having to re-write everything, each and every time we need something.
The real world effect of "a tight OODA loop" is that it attracts the sort of barnacles that slow it down. That's all it is, free glucose, for the sort of pond scum that turns this glucose into "features". No thank you.
Managers, do you sometimes feel like your developers are bullshitting you? They complain about meetings and how disruptive those are. Then they hook up for 60 minutes of lunch filled with Babylon-5 trivia — and remember all of it. Non-Managers, are you like me? You can remember large amounts of Babylon 5 trivia over lunch, get back to your code and continue being productive as if nothing happened?
A head full of pointless trivia (seriously, if you're going to pick pulp, ie, intellectual waste productsiii, at least pick something that's not third rate) and an inclination towards collecting it is a mental disability, like any other kind of garbage collecting. Some old woman keeps cats, some old guy keeps plastic bottles, and Dummkopf keeps basketball trading cards. There is no difference.
I'm not even reading the rest of the bullshit, because that's what it is, end to end, inept girly biologically aged 30+ and mentally aged 11 or so, sitting on the far side of the pond separating childhood from maturity and explaining why it can never be possibly crossed and why exactly the infantile side is all there is.
No, thank you. Fucking frogs.
PS. Rippit is a magic number in Attic poetry!
———- Something that ~I~ am, and something that not one single solitary inept dweeb dweebing about the terms and tools and role and function of this occupation can claim for himself.
If tomorrow ten thousand boyscouts of america invade a dude farm*, nobody's gonna think cowboys stand shorter than the saddle either!
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* For the record, a dude farm is a cattle ranch that turned to agrotourism, letting rich idiots from New York pretend to "live the life" for a week or two at a time. These existed in the late 1800s, yes. [↩] - I'm not about to call what's above his shoulders a mind. No fucking way. [↩]
- Do you understand what pulp fiction even is ?
Look here : at some point, the old textile fibers papermaking process was replaced with a cellulose pulp papermaking process. This resulted in much shittier paper (which is why dollar bills are still made the old way) that was correspondingly cheaper. This drove a cheapening of the whole paper usage process, which means that a large swathe of parlour maids and shop clerks that couldn't afford reading printed matter before, could now.
This sudden increase in the market was not carried naturally, but democratically, meaning the average of the new horde came below the lowest value of the previous set. Exactly like adding a bunch of people of 85 to 95 IQ to the collegiate campus, or a bunch of broke ass idiots to the "home owner" class, this deluge of "new buyers" required special attention, because they weren't actually capable of reading.
So special fiction had to be written for them, and it was. [↩]
