having worked with a silicon valley programmer I can 100% believe this sort of thing. All faith and no critical thought. Its not that she was incapable of thinking critically but some things she accepted as received wisdom and vehemently fought against even when I showed her the performance improvements.
Her reasoning about why things should be this or that when it came to these things was extremely shallow and rooted in simple to state "facts" that were often lies-to-children.
For example I had something iterating over a list a few times each time doing a different job. We were gathering things into maps and so I was just using the stream interface for that. Stream, map, filter collect. she went nuclear about it saying how wasteful it is to iterate multiple times. But I measured the performance, far faster than one big loop. And to me the reason was obvious: cache. not needing to pull more things into memory meant that each task fit more comfortably into cache.
And she didn't learn from it either. It was hardly the only thing but it is the one that sticks in my mind. She kept spouting these half truths, these rules without insight. Belief in magic, in short.
I don't abide by magical thinking. Not ever but especially not when programming.
What is magical thinking?
Magical thinking is when one learns how to achieve an effect by rote, do this then that and this and it Works. No understanding, just reciting the words delivered from on high. Chaining together effect after effect until a program is born. But the units of reasoning aren't well understood. They do SOMETHING. Maybe a brief surface level explanation but not the why. Not knowing is this a hash map or a tree map, what is the cost of this function, how much performance is reasonable to expect, etc etc across a million topics all ignored. Programming is a cult of IGNORANCE.
Sure we have lots of wonderfully skilled people out there who look behind things, who are genuinely curious and don't take good ideas as givens but interrogate them. That isn't the default, that isn't even often desired. We have created a community built on recitation NOT innovation. It hasn't been noticed because large corporations assemble the few innovations we have at scale and have fooled us into thinking that scale is itself innovation.
This isn't even about the hot button topic of the 2020s, this was before all... the goings on. Its why what is happening IS happening. Even if someone doesn't support the slopification of the craft it is only different in the scale of the shit produced not in the essential nature of it.
So if you don't want to become like the developers that sextupled their game's drive space requirements then start to question everything, kindly. Investigate claims, do small experiments, listen to the rules and then learn why they are what they are. Even if the rules are sound its worth knowing why they work, the limits of their application, and when to break the rules. It is always reasonable to wonder WHY. That isn't just self improvement either, its how we make the world better. Not recitation, not "right thinking" as prescribed by some authority, not being on a team, but stopping to humbly wonder "huh, why is that?"
kianamaiart
germansingergirl
titsay
dailybridgerton
2087
jacobvanloon
gummygunk
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
