Hacker News Reader

Comment by Locke1689 | Hacker News Reader

Wow and I thought I was arrogant. I'm 21 and I'm sure if I came out with an article deriding the mathematics community for knowing nothing about computer science I would rightly be called an ignorant asshole.

This guy's 20, probably hasn't worked on a piece of software over 100k lines of code but he knows alll about computer science and programming, right?

View on HN

I don't appreciate the ad hominem but I'll respond.

> This guy's 20, probably hasn't worked on a piece of software over 100k lines of code but he knows alll about computer science and programming, right?

I, the author, have worked with software over 100k lines of code (one example is Giac/Xcas). If we are going to talk about "industry code", we probably won't talk about Haskell (I am not implying it isn't or can't be used in industry, but Java/C++/etc. trump).

I am not claiming to be an expert at anything. If you believe I have made a claim, please feel free to let me know where.

Lastly, I'm not quite sure why my age matters. Perhaps I should delete it from my "about" page.

Lastly, I'm not quite sure why my age matters. Perhaps I should delete it from my "about" page.

I don't think deleting the part letting people know that you don't have any experience with industry programming is going to change the fact that you don't have any industry programming experience.

The issue is precisely this. You're making an assumption about my coding history which is entirely unfounded and apparently based on my age. You are right, I have not coded in Java for a company for 35 [sic] years. My good friend Bob has not coded at a company in Haskell for even 2 years. I'm not sure what your point is. I have done mundane, boring, "customer databases in Java"-esque programming before, but again, I don't see how it is relevant.

Try discussing the blog post instead of the author's bio. It may be a more convincing (and grown-up) way to air your disagreement with it.

This is tangential to your point, but I don't think that experience is correctly measured by the size of the codebases of the projects you've worked on, but rather the number of serious mistakes you've made.

Yeah, poor example sure, but my point is that his programming experience is probably too limited to categorically denounce an entire programming language community.

What else do you think about my coding experience?

Experience, in my experience :) is measured by how many serious mistakes you made, and then went on to fix.

As far as the authors posts are concerned, though, it seems weirdly appropriate to quote Erik Naggum: "If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations."

i doubt that.

What?

oh i thought the blogger was over 20. nm, i guess he is 20 since he states it in his blog.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com