A grammar-obsessed troll would vandalize C2 pages that removed his/her corrections of other's comments. Plus Ward was focusing on a "distributed wiki" and believed that to be the future. After battling vandalism once too many, he decided to pull the plug and switch to the distributed wiki beta. The distributed wiki appears to be a flop.
Copy/pasted from original page, because archive.org is bugging out (note that stuff like SelfDocumentingCode and FastEyes are links on the page):
Ayn Rand Design Philosophy
Ayn: "I don't need comments because I write SelfDocumentingCode!"
Fred: "Not quite, one has to read the entire section to find out what it's actually doing. Comments can document such in one or two lines to avoid having to read the whole section to see if its relevant to a given maintenance task. It's like a newspaper headline: you don't have to read the whole story to know the gist of the article."
Ayn: "Then read faster, I can because I have FastEyes."
Fred: "You have to consider the average maintainer, not the fastest readers."
Ayn: "I refuse to cater to mediocrity! If they can't read fast, fire them!"
Fred: "That's not our decision, Ayn."
Ayn: "Well, it should be! I should be in charge of hiring because I'm smarter and faster."
Fred: "That's wishful thinking; we have to make coding decisions based on what's the most likely staffing."
Ayn: "Then you are enabling mediocrity! I refuse to do that. I will reward smarties, like myself, to improve the world! Slow readers be damned!"
Fred: "I don't think that's the approach those who pay us want us to take."
Ayn: "Screw 'em! I do things the right way; managers be damned if they enable losers! If we don't encourage fast readers, we'll get slow losers like you! Let Darwinism improve things: if they can't keep up, let them go into another field or wither and die."
Fred: "Your user interface designs have a reputation for being hard to use. Should we then fire you for being a mediocre UI designer by the same logic?"
Ayn: "Fire stupid users also! Smart users can figure out my UI's. If you cater to stupid users, you get MORE stupid users! Don't be an Enabler of Losers!"
(COMMENTS:)
I'd promote Ayn, give her a new top-of-the-line laptop/tablet PC and a corner office, and sack Fred.
Until she replaces you due to some unforeseen criteria you've failed in her eyes.
Not a chance. I'm her boss.
Aggressive people have ways to change that.
If you always think you can out asshole an asshole, someday you'll meet an asshole that is assholier than thou. You'll get cocky about your abilities like General Lee did and end up a part-time community college teacher, just like Lee did.
Of course, it would all be reasonable except for the fact that Ayn was an idiot and not the mastermind she believed herself to be. The problem has arisen many times in real life where an organization or country has found itself being led by someone who thinks disagreement is a sign that others simply are not smart enough to understand the "great plan". 2008 was just one of many examples of where this leads to, and much of that was down to Ayn's old boyfriend/pet Alan Greenspan.
By and large, I find that people who rail against being held back by mediocrity are usually just too dumb to understand the counter-arguments and too egotistical to self-criticize. --AnonymousDonor
Are you sure about that? Do you think Google (substitute your favorite SW company here) "makes coding decisions based on what's the most likely staffing"? Or do you think they endeavor to maintain a top-notch staff so they don't have to make such compromises?
That's a meaningless question and subtly reflects the Randian assumption that there is such a thing as "top-notch" where "top-notch" means "infallable". Nobody belongs to the elite that is imagined by her childish philosophy because intelligence simply doesn't work that way. Smart people make dumb choices all the time. The huge banking crisis of 2008 was marked by a common factor of "super-geniuses" being given the keys to the kingdom and allowe...
The thing that always bothered my about Ayn Rand's works is that she was using fiction full of straw men to prove her philosophy. Being able to make the good guys and the bad guys say and do whatever conveniently proved the correctness of her beliefs seems to be exactly what this article is doing.
This seems needlessly divisive and the author's apparent obsession with unhinging Rand makes their point much less clear.
It also shows a very shallow and uninformed understanding of Rand's epistemology. She explored the concept of 'definition' in her epistemology:
> It is important to remember that a definition implies all the characteristics of the units, since it identifies their essential, not their exhaustive, characteristics; since it designates existents, not their isolated aspects; and since it is a condensation of, not a substitute for, a wider knowledge of the existents involved.
The above demonstrates that Rand was in favor of boiling a concept down to its fundamentals. She was against understanding a concept from the perspective of a non-essential trait, such as the kind of trait one with a big stick up their butt would apply to UI design, as the 'Ayn' character in the submitted webpage does.
Your comment's not backed up by evidence. I can think of more right-wing (Koch, et al) and left-wing billionaires (Soros, et al) with much more influence than...who exactly?
Also worth noting that libertarian != objectivist. There's many who espouse only one of those. Religious gun-focused libertarians for example.
And nutty propaganda is just mud slinging. How Diogenian of you!
> Are you sure about that? Do you think Google (substitute your favorite SW company here) "makes coding decisions based on what's the most likely staffing"? Or do you think they endeavor to maintain a top-notch staff so they don't have to make such compromises?
Uh, this is backwards. At Google they won’t even let you do substantial work until you’ve proven that your code can pass a readability review. And you have to do that process for every language you work in. I don’t know of any company that takes readability more seriously.
Writing easily-readable, easily-reviewed code is WAY harder than doing “10xer” incomprehensible hackery.
Different organizations have different approaches. Some try to get "the best deal" on developers, while others will pay a premium for what they consider higher-end developers. Further, non-software companies may view this differently because the hiring managers may not understand software well enough to judge and compare on abilities, and focus on mostly salary.
24 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 44.8 ms ] threadI miss the old C2.
it took about 3 minutes to load 10kb of text in times new roman, wtf
Ayn Rand Design Philosophy Ayn: "I don't need comments because I write SelfDocumentingCode!"
Fred: "Not quite, one has to read the entire section to find out what it's actually doing. Comments can document such in one or two lines to avoid having to read the whole section to see if its relevant to a given maintenance task. It's like a newspaper headline: you don't have to read the whole story to know the gist of the article."
Ayn: "Then read faster, I can because I have FastEyes."
Fred: "You have to consider the average maintainer, not the fastest readers."
Ayn: "I refuse to cater to mediocrity! If they can't read fast, fire them!"
Fred: "That's not our decision, Ayn."
Ayn: "Well, it should be! I should be in charge of hiring because I'm smarter and faster."
Fred: "That's wishful thinking; we have to make coding decisions based on what's the most likely staffing."
Ayn: "Then you are enabling mediocrity! I refuse to do that. I will reward smarties, like myself, to improve the world! Slow readers be damned!"
Fred: "I don't think that's the approach those who pay us want us to take."
Ayn: "Screw 'em! I do things the right way; managers be damned if they enable losers! If we don't encourage fast readers, we'll get slow losers like you! Let Darwinism improve things: if they can't keep up, let them go into another field or wither and die."
Fred: "Your user interface designs have a reputation for being hard to use. Should we then fire you for being a mediocre UI designer by the same logic?"
Ayn: "Fire stupid users also! Smart users can figure out my UI's. If you cater to stupid users, you get MORE stupid users! Don't be an Enabler of Losers!"
(COMMENTS:)
I'd promote Ayn, give her a new top-of-the-line laptop/tablet PC and a corner office, and sack Fred.
Until she replaces you due to some unforeseen criteria you've failed in her eyes.
Not a chance. I'm her boss.
Aggressive people have ways to change that.
If you always think you can out asshole an asshole, someday you'll meet an asshole that is assholier than thou. You'll get cocky about your abilities like General Lee did and end up a part-time community college teacher, just like Lee did.
Of course, it would all be reasonable except for the fact that Ayn was an idiot and not the mastermind she believed herself to be. The problem has arisen many times in real life where an organization or country has found itself being led by someone who thinks disagreement is a sign that others simply are not smart enough to understand the "great plan". 2008 was just one of many examples of where this leads to, and much of that was down to Ayn's old boyfriend/pet Alan Greenspan.
By and large, I find that people who rail against being held back by mediocrity are usually just too dumb to understand the counter-arguments and too egotistical to self-criticize. --AnonymousDonor
Are you sure about that? Do you think Google (substitute your favorite SW company here) "makes coding decisions based on what's the most likely staffing"? Or do you think they endeavor to maintain a top-notch staff so they don't have to make such compromises?
That's a meaningless question and subtly reflects the Randian assumption that there is such a thing as "top-notch" where "top-notch" means "infallable". Nobody belongs to the elite that is imagined by her childish philosophy because intelligence simply doesn't work that way. Smart people make dumb choices all the time. The huge banking crisis of 2008 was marked by a common factor of "super-geniuses" being given the keys to the kingdom and allowe...
I think 'illustrate' rather than 'prove' though.
It also shows a very shallow and uninformed understanding of Rand's epistemology. She explored the concept of 'definition' in her epistemology:
> It is important to remember that a definition implies all the characteristics of the units, since it identifies their essential, not their exhaustive, characteristics; since it designates existents, not their isolated aspects; and since it is a condensation of, not a substitute for, a wider knowledge of the existents involved.
The above demonstrates that Rand was in favor of boiling a concept down to its fundamentals. She was against understanding a concept from the perspective of a non-essential trait, such as the kind of trait one with a big stick up their butt would apply to UI design, as the 'Ayn' character in the submitted webpage does.
Also worth noting that libertarian != objectivist. There's many who espouse only one of those. Religious gun-focused libertarians for example.
And nutty propaganda is just mud slinging. How Diogenian of you!
Uh, this is backwards. At Google they won’t even let you do substantial work until you’ve proven that your code can pass a readability review. And you have to do that process for every language you work in. I don’t know of any company that takes readability more seriously.
Writing easily-readable, easily-reviewed code is WAY harder than doing “10xer” incomprehensible hackery.
Good design is virtually synonymous with clarity.