I'm starting to think that programmers who dip into the homebrew, demoscene and retro communities and come out talking about the beauty of programming with constraints are getting it slightly wrong.
You want constraints? If you're in a programming or engineering profession, you already have them. Heck, if you're in any profession. But, I know programming/engineering professions best because I've been in them for like 20 years. Your constraints are: Horrible bosses, bad management decisions, a pathological Capitalistic enterprise, idiotic schedules, badly written existing code bases and technical debt, people at higher levels with political control that know a lot less than you, lack of creative or design control, etc.
You want constraints? Probably also throw in: Non-existing or ineffective build and test automation, annoying auto-formatters, syntax requirements, unhelpful code reviews and nagging code review requests with people circumventing the tests to get past poorly written tests and poorly written, poorly implemented presubmit checks.
Allegiance to internally developed projects, "commitments" to buzzwordy products and "cloud" junk with mountains of configs to wade through and tame are all constraints. Getting flack and pushback for developing anything novel or simple to try to tame them adds constraints. You want constraints, you say? You got'em! They're not even all "political" or "business" constraints. A lot of those are actual technical constraints.
The thing brogrammers are missing here is that it's not just about "beautiful constraints," it's about the technical challenge, the art and passion. Any one or all of the above. Yes, the constraints help, but it's only part of it: They help to form walls of a sandbox--cracked, splintered and penetrable walls. These walls, and the sandbox, are much different than the constraints that we face in our day to day. It's a kind of purity and spirit, and a real community.
Sure, come to challenge yourself or as a vacation from the mountains of APIs, layers and bullshit tech debt you usually have to deal with. But, pull up a chair and stay a while. You might see what else you can get with those breaks, and you might be able to bring that back to the industry, and maybe not write another bs API or Framework that someone else will be mandated and required to deal with, and maybe you can bring back a sense of working within an Architecture and Community, malleability and Spirit.
You want constraints? If you're in a programming or engineering profession, you already have them. Heck, if you're in any profession. But, I know programming/engineering professions best because I've been in them for like 20 years. Your constraints are: Horrible bosses, bad management decisions, a pathological Capitalistic enterprise, idiotic schedules, badly written existing code bases and technical debt, people at higher levels with political control that know a lot less than you, lack of creative or design control, etc.
You want constraints? Probably also throw in: Non-existing or ineffective build and test automation, annoying auto-formatters, syntax requirements, unhelpful code reviews and nagging code review requests with people circumventing the tests to get past poorly written tests and poorly written, poorly implemented presubmit checks.
Allegiance to internally developed projects, "commitments" to buzzwordy products and "cloud" junk with mountains of configs to wade through and tame are all constraints. Getting flack and pushback for developing anything novel or simple to try to tame them adds constraints. You want constraints, you say? You got'em! They're not even all "political" or "business" constraints. A lot of those are actual technical constraints.
The thing brogrammers are missing here is that it's not just about "beautiful constraints," it's about the technical challenge, the art and passion. Any one or all of the above. Yes, the constraints help, but it's only part of it: They help to form walls of a sandbox--cracked, splintered and penetrable walls. These walls, and the sandbox, are much different than the constraints that we face in our day to day. It's a kind of purity and spirit, and a real community.
Sure, come to challenge yourself or as a vacation from the mountains of APIs, layers and bullshit tech debt you usually have to deal with. But, pull up a chair and stay a while. You might see what else you can get with those breaks, and you might be able to bring that back to the industry, and maybe not write another bs API or Framework that someone else will be mandated and required to deal with, and maybe you can bring back a sense of working within an Architecture and Community, malleability and Spirit.
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