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by abc_lisper 4675 days ago
> The rest is politics.

Really. No reality check? Spinning a wheel doesn't cause anything in particular, unless it meets the road.

Now I am not saying what you are saying is totally false. The truth is more nuanced, or say, more qualified.

The qualification comes from achieving something in the real world. If you can achieve something by talking to someone instead of writing code to work around it, both are equally valid.

I think of it like this. A pure function does not do any real work. The real work comes from the side effect it causes, the global variable it sets, the file it writes to, the program it talks to on the other end.

So yeah. You can cocoon yourself saying lalalalala, but you don't want to be the thread that spawned, did something to its local variables and exited. Whats the point of such a life anyways?

1 comments

You need to stop putting words in my mouth.

The context of my statement is in regards to self identification vs community identification. I write code, I release apps and I get paid. Why do I need a community to call me a coder before I can be considered one? What other people think of me, what image I put forth, etc is all marketing and politics. The only real evidence of me as the coder is what I ship. Does it scale? Does it have bugs? Does it work? That's the reality check, not whether Steve from SuperFrog Backup Solutions saw my code on github and thinks I write an elegant monad.

If you can achieve something by talking to someone instead of writing code to work around it, both are equally valid.

Nothing I wrote disputes that.

So yeah. You can cocoon yourself saying lalalalala, but you don't want to be the thread that spawned, did something to its local variables and exited. Whats the point of such a life anyways?

Consider this: a man spends a lifetime writing novels. He thinks of himself as a writer, he identifies himself as a writer and he introduces himself as a writer. He never publishes, but he's always producing. One day, his house burns down, killing him and destroying everything he's ever written. Do you think his life was wasted? Do you think he thought his life was wasted?