[HN Gopher] Personal Computing (2022)
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Personal Computing (2022)
Author : xk3
Score : 13 points
Date : 2026-03-22 19:32 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (josh8.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (josh8.com)
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| This is a bit of a meandering essay, especially towards the end.
| But to the extent that
|
| > Basically the point I'm making is that as programmers there's
| no line between professional and amateur. We force ourselves to
| only write the most robust and scalable programs, even if it's
| just for us. Best practices! We use industrial tools, the same
| infrastructure that we use at work and to power the world, at
| home.
|
| I think this is 1) only as true as any given computer-user wants
| it to be, and 2) straightforwardly a good thing.
|
| I am personally a professional software developer, that is the
| thing I do in order to earn money. So naturally when I write
| software for my own use on my own computer, I apply many of the
| same habits that I do when I write software at work in my
| professional capacity. Often this is because I think those habits
| are actually good, and will help me out personally (e.g. using
| version-control with some amount of thought put into commit
| messages, or using a programming language like Rust with an
| algebraic type system that lets me encode invariants of my code).
|
| I _do_ think it 's good that I as an individual have many of the
| same means of production as large software-production
| corporations. It's good for the same reason it's good that a lot
| of professional-grade videography and music production equipment
| is cheap enough to be within the grasp of the hobbyist. It's good
| that there are people making funny cat videos with their
| smartphones whenever they happen to see their cat doing something
| funny; as well as amateurs making high-quality films that rival
| what Hollywood does.
|
| > I always see people say that as an industry we've sort of
| collectively agreed that metaprogramming is a bad idea. Okay,
| after spelunking in some legacy codebases I can understand why
| you want code to be as straightforward as possible. That's
| optimizing for reading, reliability, blah. But why should the
| technology I use at home when programming by myself for myself,
| for making my computer do magic for me, be the same as what I do
| on a team full of people that have to maintain this thing for
| years to come. For personal computing metaprogramming makes
| perfect sense. This kind of programming should be fun, it could
| be witty, it could be whatever we want. IT SHOULD BE FREE.
|
| There isn't actually a collective agreement among professional
| programmers that metaprogramming is a bad idea. Metaprogramming
| often makes code hard to understand, which is bad regardless of
| whether the people who need to maintain it in the future are a
| team of professionals or just your future self. But there are
| ways to do metaprogramming well, and you're already free to apply
| them to your personal software, or to not do so. There's not an
| actual problem here.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| "Basically the point I'm making is that as programmers there's no
| line between professional and amateur" >> The author has not
| encountered a next level professional environment that is not
| available to consumers. Talk to meta or google employees how
| their borg, eden, semantic monorepo search and review, ci systems
| work. Or talk to a company that uses anthesis testing. Or talk to
| employees that have H200 for them or unlimited devin credits. Or
| a real design, user research, legal or QA team you can work with.
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(page generated 2026-03-22 23:01 UTC)