Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

I took away an interesting thought from the post and from your reply:

You can be harsh to ideas, but be nice to people.

Exactly. Moreover programming is not building a bridge, so sometimes a lot of arguments have no final solution or truth, and are up to the personal tastes/vision. In that case, to debate till the end of the day is quite futile once it is clear that the two arguments cannot meet in any way. In that case, better to say "thanks for the exchange" before it becomes too harsh. There is no need to win arguments.

When over a thousand people work on a single project and tens to hundreds on a single submodule, there can be no real "personal taste" entering the equation or there will be trouble.

A lot of stuff is objective[1] but not everything is and there we can't really do better than "personal taste". A coherent vision by one person might rub me the wrong way but a design by committee will certainly do so.

[1] in a practical sense, I'm very skeptical of absolute objectivity.

If nothing else, someone picks the code style, even if that code style is "anybody do what they want". Personal taste can not be removed from the equation, so you need people who can work with a project even if it doesn't entirely meet their taste. And I just mean that as one irrefutable example to prove the point; it is far from the only one.

I find that unless your taste is very unrefined, you can practice even in your own fully isolated and independent projects, because even my own personal projects pretty much never 100% conform to my own personal taste....

> There is no need to win arguments.

This is the mark of someone who has figured out an incredibly valuable truth about interacting with people.

Indeed. Very rarely does an argument change someone's opinion. Smarter people have their views changed by experience. The less smart cling to their beliefs despite experience. Hence the aphorism "consistency is the virtue of a narrow mind." For myself, I've found that a further optimization in terms of mental bandwidth is to avoid even forming a view on matters that I don't really care about. If one doesn't have a view or position on a matter, then there's no temptation to be drawn into time wasting debate.

> further optimization in terms of mental bandwidth is to avoid even forming a view on matters

I sympathise with the idea - but I think the problem is, a lot of the time opinions are a predicament, not a choice. Without consciously taking a position on a topic, you're often implicitly accepting various components of it - its logical dependencies, its framing of the problem, and so on.

My gut feeling is that people don't all have opinions ('everyone's a critic') because of widespread foolishness, but rather it's a basic characteristic and consequence of thought - just like you have to make assumptions to make a proof.

Sadly not true in practice. Different people take things more or less personally. Code ego is real and a PITA to manage.

^ This this this this this this.

And it's a two fold thing you have to do as a developer of anything: Don't get emotionally attached to your code, and always make sure it's crystal clear that you have problems with someone else's code. Never let it get personal. If you can't go have a beer with this person after you tear up some of their work, then you're failing as a collaborator IMHO.

This is how all discourse should be, really, but personal attacks get mixed in so much, not even consciously a lot of the time I'm sure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com