Comments...

When I first started blogging, over a decade ago, there were lots of times where I found the comments frustrating. It’s nice when people compliment you, but beyond that, I wasn’t so sure. 

Occasionally I’d get comments about my spelling or grammar. Although I understand where that comes from, I felt that people were missing the point. I’m an awful writer, horrible speller, and never really learned English grammar despite it being my first and only language. In the beginning, I was struggling so hard with getting anything written, that I’d be super happy that I managed to anything published, but then people would be pointing out that it wasn’t really well edited. They were right, and I usually fixed the errors, but I rather wished they would add sometimes more valuable in their comments.

I really liked genuine insights, where they pointed out that there was something I misunderstood and provided a reference or explanation. That’s a great way to learn, and in a field like software development that is so large we can’t even get exposed to a fraction of it, someone helping like that, giving pointers to deeper knowledge is great.

Sometimes people asked interesting questions. That was cool too, but I remember a few times struggling to answer something after a long, and horrible day at work. I guess I felt obligated to answer as soon as possible, so while I enjoyed it, I did find it a bit stressful sometimes. As I’ve aged, and consumed way too much ‘information’ about programming, sometimes I just overflow and go blank. That’s another odd feeling in that I know that I’ve encountered the answer at some point, but my brain just can’t search for it anymore.

Once in a while, I’d get a “you’re all wrong’” comment, without references, knowledge, etc. In general, I try to stay away from the deeply subjective parts of the industry, but over the years there have often been many popular trends that were rather obviously not good trends. I supposed the classic is Hungarian notation, which was a way of obfuscating variable names, supposedly to make them easier to think up, but really it had a strong tendency to decrease the readability of the code quite heavily. At the time, since it came from Microsoft, lots of younger programmers felt quite strongly that it was a superior way of handling naming, and couldn’t understand why other programmers were against it. We still see those types of conflicts in our industry, often enough that in my cynical old age I sometimes equate too much popularity with wrongness, in the sense that for any ideas have been watered down so much that they now appeal to everyone, that process itself may have caused the ideas to go astray. 

These days, I am rather keen again to get comments. It’s partly because I’ve pretty much written every post at least twice by now, but also because I have a real sense that our industry is stagnating. I’ve always been searching around the edges, looking for new and interesting work, but over the last decade, although there are some neat things happening in a few hidden corners, it seems as if a lot less of it is occurring now. We’re not talking about software, we not exploring new ideas much anymore, we’re not even trying to analyze what we are doing to find a better way to get it done. It seems like pretty much everyone has just given up and decided that coding is about copying and pasting stuff from StackOverflow into their editor as fast as possible. It’s just a stressful grind that cycles between using different broken code bases. 

So, it would be nice to get back to discussing stuff again. There are so many interesting paths for us to choose to move this industry forward. We’ve pretty much been doing the same work over and over again for the last twenty years, it would be nice to explore some new territory.