Thoughts
Rant alert
I’ve been having this idea for a while, and when having dinner with my other programmer friend yesterday, I jokingly said that “Have you noticed there is a very popular programming paradigm that’s been adopted everywhere but no one is aware of it?” Yes, it is what I call Next Job Oriented Programming(NJOP).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against adopting new tech by any means, it’s good and healthy to keep our tech stack up to date.
I’ve been following Jonathan Blow for some time now, and this talk is gold.
One phrase scared me the most: deeply mediocre. I realized that I’ve been trying all I can to avoid that.
I do not remember how I find this guy on Youtube but BOY, my world is not the same.
I just link two of his talks here from Youtube. You can certainly find more.
I’m also interested in what books he would recommend to programmers. Here is the list of books he named in the interview with Developers On Fire.
I then go on to find what books he wrote.
OOP is still dominating in today’s software shops, especially in mobile/web development. Design patterns, SOLID principles and TDD etc. are the mainstream mindset to develop OOP software.
I still remembered my first programming job. Huge codebase, don’t know where to start. I even took notes of the code in my notebook and drew graphs of it. But still didn’t have a clue after years gone by. My desk was by the window, I used to look outside the window while standing beside it a lot.
I recently watched the talk A Guide for the Perplexed given by Joe Armstrong.
He recommended two papers. One is A Plea for Lean Software by Niklaus Wirth, who is the creator of the Pascal language.
After I read the paper I found that the this man is brilliant! He had found some of the deep problems in the industry and offered solutions decades ago. Unfortunately no one listened to him.
