> In the 1970s, programming was an elite's task. Today programming is done by uneducated "farmers" and as a result, the care for smart algorithms, memory usage, CPU-time usage and the like has dwindled in comparison.
What's wrong with that statement? In 1970's, the number of people who dealt with programming was significantly smaller than today. It's a matter of fact. And people who worked with computers back then were highly educated and pioneers of the technology, there was no room for half-hearted effort or "let's copy the first result from stackoverflow.com".
Today, programmers who are meticulous, detail-oriented and who genuinely recognize the problem first are in minority and that's how I read the above.
The author might have stated it abruptly, but it does not mean he's wrong. You're using the "cool little library", yet you have this kind of resentment for the person who made it, have you even tried to look at the situation from their perspective before you passed the judgement?
I'm asking out of curiosity, because I can relate to having to work with under-skilled individuals who spend more time sorting out their CV and online presence than their work.
You can be both right and an asshole. These things are not exclusive. There is a way to say what he is saying without calling all of today's programmers "farmers", which also has some undertones that being a farmer is somehow shameful.
> under-skilled individuals who spend more time sorting out their CV and online presence than their work
That sounds more like a organizational/hiring problem.
In gaming culture, a farmer is someone who repeats the same actions for extended periods of time.
It's not an insult in gaming context, and "farming" in the context of our craft does not relate to actual farmers. It sounds like taking things out of context to gain moral upper hand which allows for insulting the author.
I have to be devil's advocate, this whole shaming because someone else might have gotten offended is seriously tiresome.
Library is crafted well, guy's annoyed with self-proclaimed crappy devs, yet the freedom to say so is revoked by the very community he helps.
But it's not an insult towards actual farmers, it's an insult towards an impostor that pretends they're doing valuable work while all they do is the opposite and they merely throw time at a problem, creating illusion of value.
I'm saying this because I'm raised on a farm, I was always proud of it, I still do it as a hobby (and I love my crops) and I never, ever considered it an insult when I heard a term "farmer" or "peasant".
Nowadays, I read about people being offended in my stead, giving themselves the right to insult other people, like author of microwebsockets.
Is there a world in which haters could hate without using excuses such as "it insults farmers"?
I'm one of the farmers, I am not insulted, I do have the right to say this and point the attention at the *real* problem - and it's fake developers.
"Farmer" is even more degrading in Swedish ("bonde"), to the point where you avoid using it even for actual farmers and say "agriculturalist" ("jordbrukare") instead.
It's a poorly translated word written in a haste. A better translation would be "red neck" (I think?). This is translated from my inner Swedish thoughts and we don't have Californian wokeness here (especially not down here in Skåne). But instead of finding a new word I reformulated that section everyone is so upset about. It's fascinating how easy it is for internet people to assume worst intent in everything, and look for things to be offended by, rather than to read between the lines and adjust ones interpretation based on context.
If you read the section, applying context from what the project is about and where it is used, you should pretty easily grasp the overall idea that is: "compression sucks and is incredibly inefficient". It would be a much more interesting thread if people took that message and argued against/for it, technically. But now we are here arguing about some word usage that might be offensive if interpreted in a very literal way. Congratulations; we have reached peak cancel culture. I hope you enjoy it while it lasts.
> In gaming culture, a farmer is someone who repeats the same actions for extended periods of time.
This isn't gaming. This is a programming library.
> It's not an insult in gaming context
This is not a "gaming context."
> and "farming" in the context of our craft does not relate to actual farmers
I've never heard anyone refer to "farming" in the context of programming. Please share with me more of the use of farming in the context of programming (not gaming).
> I have to be devil's advocate
This is a lie. You do not "have" to be devil's advocate. This was a choice you made.
> yet the freedom to say so is revoked by the very community he helps.
This is a lie.
Stop being a liar.
Finally, do not "revoke" my "freedom" to say this to you by disagreeing or arguing against me.
> This isn't gaming. This is a programming library.
And humans can be gamers and programmers. Welcome to real life, tutorial is now over.
> This is not a "gaming context."
When a word is placed in quotes, convention is that it has alternate meaning. I gave perspective, gaming is something that's socially well-known, along with its terms. Don't pretend you're unaware. Don't be a liar.
> I've never heard anyone refer to "farming" in the context of programming. Please share with me more of the use of farming in the context of programming (not gaming).
I won't.
> This is a lie. You do not "have" to be devil's advocate. This was a choice you made.
And these are mental gymnastics that you allow yourself so you can justify being rude. Don't be a liar.
> This is a lie.
> Stop being a liar.
Feel free to stop being a liar.
> Finally, do not "revoke" my "freedom" to say this to you by disagreeing or arguing against me.
I can assume you're accustomed to being invasive, rude and impolite but please, keep it for your inner circle of people. Or keep giving out orders to strangers from internet who will never interact with you after exchanging these words.
Speaking for myself, how I interpreted it is that there is some relationship between how unskilled developers do their job and what takes place during actual farming.
When I first heard of the term farmer/farming in-game, I didn't think anyone meant to point to any stereotypes either, just that the actual act had similarities with farming. Granted, in this sentence it's easier to interpret it the other way, but isn't it always better to give someone the benefit of the doubt? I can see how the process of programming lazily without understanding can resemble farming -and there might be a more intuitive metaphor if the author is not a native english speaker.
He follows through with an entire rant about people using "2022-10-26 14:59:42" to represent dates instead of 1666789167 Unix timestamps, and JSON in general. If that's really your best example then meh... I use JSON and string time formats because it's just easier to inspect things with curl or whatnot and gives a nice balance between human-readable and machine-readable, which I rather like for APIs. I do the same with database stuff, so "select * from foo" can be easily read. It can be quite helpful in debugging and the performance difference (even with compression) is just negligible in most cases.
But what do I know ... I'm just a farmer. Now excuse me while I go shove my computer down a shredder and go do something else.
> In 1970's, the number of people who dealt with programming was significantly smaller than today. It's a matter of fact. And people who worked with computers back then were highly educated and pioneers of the technology, there was no room for half-hearted effort or "let's copy the first result from stackoverflow.com".
And yet probably the same percentage of what they wrote was utter crap [0]. The illusion comes from having more people writing more code for more reasons now. Sturgeon's law still applies.
On top of that, the industry rewards those who:
* "Produce results" insetad of those who pre-empted a bug 5 years in advance by building something to be robust [1].
* Job hop every year or two, and thereby disproportionately rewarding those who work on their CV.
* Are personal friends and family of higher ups [2].
To claim the major reason why software is in its current state is largely/solely because of all the "farmers" is harmful ignorance, at best.
> programmers who are meticulous, detail-oriented and who genuinely recognize the problem first are in minority
Perhaps the biggest problems in(/with) technology today aren't of a technical nature. If even somewhat true, then those who are "meticulously and genuinely recognizing the problems" aren't necessarily even programmers.
[0]: This is hard/impossible to know one way or the other due to survivorship bias. A lot of software from the 70s is just gone.
[1]: Instances of this are hard to even find, naturally. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that.
[2]: Hardly exclusive to IT, but still a significant factor.
As someone who once was part of an outsourced team maintaining a COBOL system, I can attest to the fact that people wrote shit then, and will continue to write shit. I was trying to debug and figure what the hell was going on in some especially complex logic and found the author's comment at the top of the file with the date "1983". I put my resignation papers 2 weeks later and moved on to JS, Python and systems design
That wasn't my understanding of the past. I had the perspective that early programmers were basically cowboys in the wild west, people from a variety of backgrounds that were just in the right place and took on the projects.
What's wrong with that statement? In 1970's, the number of people who dealt with programming was significantly smaller than today. It's a matter of fact. And people who worked with computers back then were highly educated and pioneers of the technology, there was no room for half-hearted effort or "let's copy the first result from stackoverflow.com".
Today, programmers who are meticulous, detail-oriented and who genuinely recognize the problem first are in minority and that's how I read the above.
The author might have stated it abruptly, but it does not mean he's wrong. You're using the "cool little library", yet you have this kind of resentment for the person who made it, have you even tried to look at the situation from their perspective before you passed the judgement?
I'm asking out of curiosity, because I can relate to having to work with under-skilled individuals who spend more time sorting out their CV and online presence than their work.