[lttlrck]

At what layer of abstraction are you no longer an artisan? Or doesn't it matter?

It's a nice "label" but it's a bit murky what it means the farther away from machine code (the raw materials) you get. Are you an artisan if you use an IDE?

I do enjoy the sentiment however.

[skydhash]

I think it all depends on amount of care you put in the human aspect of the software. Does it solve a specific need for a person you can name, or the stories are all about imaginary characters and generic persona. Crafting requires empathy and the realization that this will be used by and for people, and you want to make it easy for them (even if people means you as one person). And the promise to make it better the next time you're working on it or something similar.

[j7ake]

Artisan products are usually tailor made for one person.

So an artisan program would involve many hardcoded variables relevant for a specific user, and hard links that connects files for a specific users computer.

Basically one that has as little abstraction as possible. The end product would look like a script.

[ok_dad]

Is woodworking valid with power tools or is the tool doing the art? What about a CNC in the workshop? I think it’s all valid because the art is in the planning and resulting furniture. Same thing for coding. Even an LLM needs human creative input.

[moffkalast]

It depends purely on the level of snobbery you want to strive for.

[slowhadoken]

It’s not snobbery, it’s knowledge and craft. You depend on the transfer of that knowledge from one generation to the next.

[fragmede]

Except we don't, because technology advances and techniques get lost because they're no longer useful. I have no idea how to make a buggy whip or drive a horse to market, because we don't do that anymore. I'm sure someone can find a manufacturer that survived the downturn but a lot of that knowledge has simply been lost to the sands of time.

Fortunately we have YouTube University and (for now) the Internet Archive, where hopefully current techniques won't be lost, but we'll just have to see how the future goes.

The privilege to use old timey techniques and then sell furniture on the basis that no power tools were used in the making of it is practically the definition of snobby, as if using power tools to make furniture lead to bad energy being imbued in the table that makes it unsuitable for being used as a table. You don't have to buy any furniture if you don't want it, especially if it's poorly made, but power tools don't automatically mean it's poorly made. You can make really shite furniture with hand tools just as much as with power tools.

[slowhadoken]

Knowledge transfer is a serious thing in important companies. Technology advances but it’s based on the same logical and mathematical principals. Techniques aren’t lost, they’re warehoused. I’ve rewritten advanced data structures that were purposed in the 1960’s, successfully applied in the 1990’s, and they’re still relevant and cutting edge today.

[ok_dad]

I hate saying that anything is no longer useful, but the commenter above has a point about how tech will get lost as it becomes outdated and useless. Your example, for instance, shows that those data structures were useful, because they were warehoused and saved in some way. You don't see people using a lot of magnetic core memory these days, even in space. Using a handsaw is still useful today, even for non-snobby furniture, because there are some cuts that a power tool cannot replicate accurately. A hand plane is still valuable in the workshop for many things. One thing you see less and less of today is a hand drill, however, because they are objectively less good at drilling accurate holes than a power drill of some type. I wouldn't call the users of hand drills snobs, because some people prefer hand tools for many reasons, such as being quieter, but they are definitely not using a hand drill to gain an advantage over power tools.

[slowhadoken]

You know what an artisan is though. There are varying degrees of artisans and craftsmen. Just extend that metaphor to programming. Layers of abstraction aren’t infinite. I’d say metal on metal is a master craftsman in terms of programming.

[wsintra2022]

Vim users only

[jairojair]

Good take!