Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You're right about a lot of this knowledge being transferable, but I think you might also be underestimating just how much useful specialist knowledge you can acquire specific to a particular toolchain, and how much of a step back starting over can be.

I happen to have been doing Perl professionally for a while now and I'd say it would take me at least 2 years to get equally up to speed on another toolchain.

Sure I can write programs productively in other languages, but with my language of choice I don't have to look up dozens of little things a day, avoid common and less common pitfalls all the time, and generally choose the easier path the first time around because I've been around the block a bunch of times.

No matter what toolchain you use productivity at that level is hard to come by, and a lot of it is toolchain-specific. I can competently hack C but someone who's been doing it for 10 years will run laps around me.

So while I'm certainly not married for life to the toolchain I'm using I also think that many people underestimate just how much effort it is to truly become completely intimately familiar with some tool, and how much you constantly gain in productivity for having done so.

That's exactly why it's useful to get familiar with multiple toolchains. If you are pretty comfortable with Ruby and move to Python, you'll have a pretty good idea about what pitfalls you'll encounter in a dynamically typed, interpreted language. Of course there's a learning curve, but it's less intense for languages with similar building blocks.

The first homework assignment when moving to a new language/stack is to google: "<language/stack/whatever> fucking sucks" and read the first 10 pages or so, you'll get a sense of the pitfalls.

I can easily switch between dynamic languages, including Perl, Python and Ruby.

What I'm talking about is the level of toolchain familiarity where e.g. you can look at a given piece of code and know exactly which opcodes it'll get compiled to, what algorithms those opcodes will employ, and by extension how everything else in the system works.

Now I certainly don't pretend to know all of that with Perl, but once you have that level of intimate knowledge that extends way beyond just the differences between similar languages with similar building blocks you'll reach a level of mastery that you don't want to give up easily.

If you accept a job at a new company you might have to start to understand tens of thousands of new lines of code to have a proper understanding of the system you're working with.

Similarly the hairy bits of programming language toolchains are tens to hundreds of of thousands of lines of code that you have to understand to truly know how they work.

My point is that assuming that you can easily transfer that knowledge on a whim just because you can read the syntax introduction of some new programming language is folly.

The toolchain is more complex than most people give it credit for, and mastering it matters.

Sure. I don't think anyone is saying there's no value in mastering the toolchain.

But the OP was talking about blowing his life savings on a bakery because he couldn't find a job programming in Perl. If you ever find yourself starting to think like that, a big red flashing sign with the words 'Warning: excessive attachment to a particular tool!' should be lighting up in your mind.

But the OP was talking about blowing his life savings on a bakery because he couldn't find a job programming in Perl.

No, he wasn't. The article isn't about Perl. The article is about the excessive attachment to novelty and reinvention as practiced in much of the programming world today.

> What I'm talking about is the level of toolchain familiarity where e.g. you can look at a given piece of code and know exactly which opcodes it'll get compiled to, what algorithms those opcodes will employ, and by extension how everything else in the system works.

Indeed, and I can say for sure the author of the post has such a low level knowledge of Perl.

I agree completely. This is particularly prescient for me because I finally made the leap from PHP to Ruby with a job I started 2/5/2014 (hold your applause :P). There's a lot to learn, but I actually find myself more happy and productive. Also, I'm a bit of a junky for learning new tools and the like so that's part of the fun.

I think the trend is that generally people are happy with the new language when they learn it because they want to. It gives you a chance to assess the warts of the previous language by seeing a new way to do things (and eventually an appreciation of what they did right but is problematic in the new language).

When moving to a language you aren't really enthused about, it can feel like all downsides. For me that was having to dive deep into some PHP projects. Although that may have been more to do with the nature of going from Perl to PHP, which really, really felt like regressing to me (PHP sort of feels like a very old, constrained version of Perl). I think the only feature I preferred in PHP was classes, and that point is more than moot now, it's reversed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com