Well he is kind of right. I'm familiar with enterprise IT, and there are very mediocre programmers at work. I'll bet you most of them have never heard of "futures". Sad, but thats how I experienced it.
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> I'm familiar with enterprise IT
I am also familiar with snobby wannabees functional programmers who instead of opening the goddam file and reading it are creating homomorphic endofunctors wrapped in futures with double memoization and distributed locks, so that nobody on the fucking team knows what's going on.
These people are 10x more dangerous than mediocre programmers who just find the simplest way to get the work done and ship the product.
Eventually 1% of the wannabes might get enlightened and realize that simple basic code is usually better than using every single programming concept wrapped in 100 lines of code that nobody (including themselves 2 weeks later) can understand.
That's quite a feat of mind-reading you performed there. The fascination with technology rather than just to solve the problem at hand via the shortest critical path is a thing that has been puzzling me for a long time. At some level technology is so fascinating in its own right that the temptation to lose sight of the goal is ever present and many people succumb to that temptation.
Imo it's just another variation on the Yak Shaving theme with a dose of procrastination thrown in for good measure.
“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.
After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.
Absolutely useless. We had tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the delight in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
> The fascination with technology rather than just to solve the problem at hand via the shortest critical path is a thing that has been puzzling me for a long time
Exactly. And fascination with technology is important, it is what keeps people learning and searching, finding better tools. The problem with it, is it has a pathological side.
Like the tool analogy, just because I found an experimental, electronic, automatic nail gun, voice activated, with blinking lights, doesn't mean I should use it when building my own house, if all I need is to hammer a few nails, a regular trusted hammer will do.
I fully agree, thats why I don't like Scala. Readability and simplicity above everything.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be familiar with the basic concepts of the programming language that you use, and I feel the silicon valley bubble is sometimes unaware that not all programmers are startup hot shots.
You actually support my argument, introducing the concept of futures is just an added layer of unnecessary "cleverness" that could be avoided with quasar/pulsar.
People who don't follow your favourite programming paradigm are mediocre? Did you mean that or is it just a poorly constructed paragraph?
Certainly not. I was just responding to dxbydt , who was questioning the statement that futures and promises are unfamiliar to many programmers, and I think they are, because I've seen some corporate IT departments from the inside, and its just a different environment.
In no way do I endorse the use of futures or whatnot, nor are they my "favourite programming paradigm".
I am simply advocating the simplest solution that works, and avoiding constructs like promises/futures seems like a good idea in that regard.