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Comment by RomanPushkin | Hacker News Reader

It's called "anecdotal evidence", the only thing that makes this post credible(-ish) is that PG wrote it.

It's not just PG: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20212869

Although I do think between Python and Java, just pick your poison, they're not night and day. Unless you're writing 1990s Java consisting of factories of factories which is more to do with library style and over-conventionalism (back then when people were writing APIs after reading GOF). Even in 2004 I don't think there's much credibility in knowing both languages although I wasn't around.

What I find stupid that a lot of recruiters and jobs look for certain languages/technologies and require X years of experience in them. Sometimes requirements predating the existence of certain frameworks. Makes sense if you for some reason need a Kubenetes guy but mostly not.

> Unless you're writing 1990s Java consisting of factories of factories which is more to do with library style and over-conventionalism

But I still see this happen more than 20 years later when brilliant ex-Java folks are doing Python.

Java has this weird cultural inertia which reminds me of "Five Monkey Experiment".

Since I have been following PG on Twitter I understand that the reason he has so many good takes is because he has so many takes in general. And most people tend to skip over the incoherent, offensive or just plain dumb ones.

I wish more of those weren't flagged to death when people post them here.

A broken clock is right twice a day.

No. People aren't clocks. The best way to make something great is to make ten meh things and discard a hundred crap things. I guarantee you everyone whose takes you admire also have many, many bad takes (which they perhaps don't tweet, but there's a definite trade-off here and PG's lower threshold for tweeting seems to work well enough for his goals).

I take it you're not aware/familiar of/with the phrase.

Here's a deeper explanation from a random Google search result.: https://www.businesswritingblog.com/business_writing/2022/05...

This here. Regardless of talent, you will produce quite a lot of junk.

I am a programmer and a published book author (8 books so far and over 35000 sold copies). I wrote a pile of shit, too, but it helped me become a better coder and a better author.

PG's takes are pretty good by Twitter standards at least. Honestly his account is one of my favorites on Twitter. If you don't think his tweets are good, I'm genuinely curious whose tweets you actually like -- can you recommend any accounts?

To be fair, blog posts based on anecdotal evidence hit the frontpage on HN all the time. I think you're implicitly holding PG to a higher standard.

Then again, maybe he's asking for it, given that he calls his blog posts "essays". Lol.

Not everything needs to be scientific or supported by hard evidence. It’s just a short blog post, 100% an opinion, nothing else.

Well said. This read like pure pseudoscience to me, hehe.

Pseudoscience feels like the wrong label, because it's not trying to be science. To me, it's clearly just an opinion post based on his personal experience.

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