> IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field.
IMO it was funding that made the difference. People outside of USA did not have any less passion towards the field.
Any amount of funding gets immediately sucked into the abyss. The entire mathematical research community in Soviet Union probably cost less than a series C startup.
The only sense in which this is true is if choosing that field is a death sentence relative to other society outcomes due to lack of resources.
> Where’s the high? Where’s that immediate endorphin rush? Where’s the event that makes you realise “hey, maybe I’m really fucking good at this”?
As a person who's had only bad managers (with one exception), this is a signal that I wouldn't want this person to be my manager.
Being a manager shouldn't be about yourself, your focus should be outwards.
I get it, not everyone can be the kind-hearted Samaritan who always thinks of others. But even if you're one of the self-centred majority who thinks the universe revolves around them, keeping your subjects happy is still a requirement if you want them to be productive and motivated over a long period of time. Don't they teach that in Management 101?
You're reading a lot more into it than has been said. First, feeling good about yourself is a human requirement, it's nothing special, everyone has it. Second, this requirement doesn't preclude you from thinking of others. Just like a parent doesn't have to hate themselves to love their kids. And third, if you expect your managers to never take care of their emotional needs you are only pushing them to burn out.
> feeling good about yourself is a human requirement
Sure. I feel good about being kind to other people, whereas the author's specifically chasing some sort of highs. I don't know where this expectation could have come from, considering managers are almost universally considered to have "more responsibility". More responsibility means more stress and less fun. You'd expect an adult to understand this before moving into management, but alas.
> Second, this requirement doesn't preclude you from thinking of others. Just like a parent doesn't have to hate themselves to love their kids.
To continue your comparison, a parent is expected to think of their kids first. We call that responsibility.
> third, if you expect your managers to never take care of their emotional needs you are only pushing them to burn out.
Nobody said that. But if your emotional need is to get constant highs and you didn't have enough foresight to realise you won't get that in management, I simply don't want you as my manager.
Like I said in my original comment, this blog post is a signal. I could be wrong, but I've seen so many bad managers that my intuition tells me something's off.
Yeah, poor poor lonely managers. They hold a lot of power over other people ("responsibility") and yet we're supposed to be sorry for them. Their burden is so great that they cry on the internet that they're not getting their endorphins.
> The driver was an asshole for not finding somewhere else to put it.
In the former soviet block, you don't "find somewhere else" to park your car. You grab the first spot where you fit because you don't know if there is another free anywhere else.
Incidentally, that's why i like 4 meter cars. On streets with parallel parking, they fit in more places than the 4.5 m or more.
> Well...
Okay he could have been an asshole for other reasons, including for importing the F-150 here.
But the parking spots were at 45 degree angle and while it was narrow enough to fit in two if parked at 45, it was too long and it would have blocked the access lane with the tip. So it was parallel parked on 3 which was the only way to not block anyone.
And way too big. Why doesn't have Samsung a Mini version anymore? If they look I really don't care, but that they are all scaled like tablets (the cheap ones) annoys me.
> But the idea of encapsulation in an object is there in the most popular modern languages.
Encapsulation is not specific to OOP at all. C is not OOP and yet it has encapsulation just fine.
> If the concept of calling `my_list.is_empty()` instead of `is_empty(my_list)` is "OOP", then I think it is actually still very much in fashion and for good reasons.
You're absolutely right, it's fashion.
> And that's the new "trend": dropping class inheritance, "Composition over inheritance".
New trend, huh? You realise that that saying came out 30 years ago? It took that long for the brainwashed OOP masses to even acknowledge that inheritance is bad.
> Nix only exists to be the language for Nix, the package manager. While people have occasionally used it for other use-cases, it is explicitly not a general-purpose language.
The next question is why is the Nix package manager needed and why should a software developer care. I don't know the answer.
Nix allows you to install packages without naming or version conflicts. It allows you to make source repositories act as first-class packages. It can be installed on any Linux distribution and MacOS. Changing and customizing packages is trivial. All the building and installing happens outside of the source tree, so you don't clutter up your $HOME. It's reproducible. It's simple. And it's build with the needs of Free Software in mind (unlike snap or flatpak which seem mostly concerned with packaging proprietary software). Also Nix is 20 years old at this point.
Simply put, with Nix I can do:
nix run github:project/name
to run a program. Not many other package managers are capable of that.
That's cool but Brew seems to work just fine for my needs (and most developers on a Mac, apparently). Which is why I think the question still stands; unclear why people should care when the status quo is good enough.
1. their home environments: for packages (some reach for brew on MacOS) and configurations (dotfiles, and some reach for stow).
2. their development shells: for build dependencies (compilers, SDKs, libraries), tools (LSP, linters, formatters, debuggers), and services (runtime, database). Some reach for devcontainers here.
3. or even their operating systems: for development, for CI, for deployment, or for personal use.
Nix provision all of the above in the same language, with Nixpkgs, NixOS, home-manager, and devShells such as https://devenv.sh/. What's more, Nix is (https://nixos.org/):
- reproducible: what works on your dev machine also works in CI and in prod,
- declarative: you version control and review your configurations and infrastructure as code, at a reasonable level of abstraction, to specify what the system should be, not how to get there,
- reliable: all changes (switching generations or profiles) are atomic with easy roll back.
Thank you, it makes sense. I guess these points would resonate with me if I had the problems you describe. Fortunately, I usually don't.
The less I fiddle with packages, dot files, shell scripts, the better my life is.
Github was more popular than Bitbucke, so git unfortunately won.