> The software ecosystem is not well served by everyone being focused on the same few familiar programming approaches. Sure there are economies of scale—better tooling, programmer fungibility—but there is less intellectual diversity.
Then it seems that the problem has more to do with political economy than with programmer culture. Capital and managers want programmers to be cogs, not artisans.
Can’t expect programmers to change this political problem, either. Especially considering that the nerdier the technologist, the less political he or she is.
Those middle class progressives sure are easy to spot. Unlike you, with your innovative counter-arguments like “homogeneous country v.s. diverse America”, “some people just wanna be addicts”, “street lifestyle”—you are a real original.
Shrug. I grew up in a rural 99% white state, and lived the 'street' or frankly trailer lifestyle when I was 17-18 years old with tons of other working class folks. Blow & oxys in the trailer park, etc. I'm pretty familiar with it. All of the friends & family addicts I describe from personal experience (grandfather, uncle, best friend, other friends etc.) are in the same category.
As shocking as it may be for you- yes, tons of hard drug users & addicts are fairly happy with their lifestyle and not looking to change. Especially when their prospects as sober, working class members of society making $25k a year working construction or retail or something are actually pretty boring & unsatisfying
> Normally programming language blog posts get started with grammars and syntax and parsing and all sorts of stuff like that. I can't be bothered with all of that,
And I can’t be bothered with C++ for compiler construction.
> More than just minorities, the wasted talent problem extends even to the elite. Ivy League students aspire to work in investment banking and management consulting. The finance industry is one of the biggest modern-day brain drains.
The elite is supposed to be a net drain on society. Or else they would not be “elite”.
> The wasting of talent does not always look like someone languishing in a position below their abilities. Waste of talent can also look like someone expending their creativity pushing addictive services or building products for an audience of pampered elitists.
Oh, my heart bleeds for Silicon Valley-type (the TV series) programmers. Sniff.
You’re like the main character in Hurt Locker at the end of the movie. He has come home from deployment and is standing in a supermarket. The mundane, everyday reality of First World civilian life seems meaningless in contrast.
So he goes back for another deployment. Another deployment in a pointless and meaningless war, yet another racket that has everything to do with the interests of the powerful and nothing to do with sentimental crap like serving your country. But he feels that it is meaningful.
I don't disagree with you. Seeing civilians with real struggles in a world destroyed by years of warfare that would crush the soul of the average depressed American puts your own trivial problems in a completely different perspective, especially when they are happily making the best of their situation.
This is my fourth deployment. When I go back to my comfy civilian job as the elite senior developer it is a bit depressing seeing the things people complain about at the job.
As an example consider this scenario that I went through:
Another developer was telling me I was using the wrong IDE. I needed to be using Atom because it has the fantastic extension called Atom Beautify that beautifies a whole bunch of different languages with a huge ton of options. I guess he didn't realize I am a collaborator on the project and many of the supported languages are available because of my beautifier integrated into the extension. Then when I am leaving the company for this military separation I had to hear from my boss in the exit interview that some code I wrote months ago was horrid, because the other developers only know how to read OOP code (even though I provided extensive documentation). Nobody bothered to talk about it or explain their distaste. How am I supposed to process that?
Until he open sources the code (or at least lets someone else try it/look at it) discussing his “language” is giving him too much credit.