Comment by EasyMark
2 days ago
I have definitely done such things out of pettiness. Sometimes people just attract your attention as deserving of an attempt to humble them. I hope people will humble me as well when my vociferousness outstrips my talent. It's good to be sent directly back to home every now and then.
What i don't get is why people gravitate toward trying to show off how many symbols they're able to manipulate in their brain without screwing something up.
It's a computer. It does what it was instructed to do, all 50 million or so of them. To think you as a puny human have complete and utter mastery over it is pure folly every single time.
As time goes on I become more convinced that the way to make progress in computing and software is not with better languages, sure, those are very much appreciated, since language has a strong impact on how you even think about problems, but it's more about tooling and how we can add abstractions to the software to leverage the computer we already got to alleviate the eye gouging complexity of trying to manage it all by trying to predict how it will behave with our pitiful neuron sacs.
Don't forget about naming variables like it's a punchcard and every character matters.