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RealMensch
Personal blog · realmensch.orgprogrammingcareer
RealMensch is a personal blog at realmensch.org about programming and career. Since 2013, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 13 times, most often “Goodbye, Lua (2016)”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this 2017 reprint of Neil Rickert's "The Parable of the Two Programmers", about programmers who think first and whose good work looks obvious and so goes uncredited.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Ramblings of an old-school software developer, father, and woodworker.
Most-linked posts?
- Goodbye, Lua (2016)4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-01-10
- The Parable of Two Programmers4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-02-13
What Hacker News says?
This reminds me of the "Parable of the Two Programmers." [1] A story about what happens to a brilliant developer given an identical task to a mediocre developer. [1] I preserved a copy of it on my (no-advertising or monetization) blog here: https://realmensch.org/2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-pro...
Comment linking /2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-programmers/
on “Is something bugging you?”Submitted Goodbye, Lua (2016) as a story · 9 points
HN discussionFamuosly described as the tale of the two programmers - the one who spends their time thinking will provide exponentially better work, though because good work look obvious they will often not receive credit. Eg. https://realmensch.org/2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-pro...
Comment linking /2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-programmers/
on “Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)”Submitted Goodbye, Lua (2016) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionNot anything that's updated with any regularity. As I ramp up to a Kickstarter I'm certainly going to be updating more, but that hasn't started yet, so everything is pretty stale. The sad truth is that I feel like a lot of things that go on are either not worthy of writing about, or they involve some kind of sensitive negotiation or relationship that I shouldn't post about. At the end of the day I end up paralyzed b…
Comment linking /
on “Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men”Submitted The Parable of Two Programmers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionDynamically generated sites are a Bad Idea when they can be trivially statically generated. A lot of people still think using WordPress or even Rails for site generation is fine, but both are hard to scale. And if the site is small or academic, it will fall over with not too much traffic. I wrote a rant [1] about this a couple of weeks ago. I can guarantee that my site will never have a "Database Connection Failed"…
Comment linking /2016/11/22/drupal-is-dead-long-live-static-site-generation/
on “Immutable.js: An Introduction with examples written for humans”Submitted Bidding a Freelance Contract as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI didn't throw away Lua because I couldn't persist coroutines. That's just why I didn't use Lua coroutines the way the article recommends; I had plenty of of other reasons to abandon Lua. [1] [1] https://realmensch.org/2016/05/28/goodbye-lua/
Comment linking /2016/05/28/goodbye-lua/
on “Using Lua coroutines to create an RPG dialogue system”Submitted Good Bye Lua as a story · 2 points
HN discussionCoroutines are awesome, don't get me wrong. BUT , contrary to what I believed when I was still working with Lua, making the coroutine explicit (like async/await in C# and JavaScript ES2017) is actually even better. In particular, when your coroutines are explicit, you can say "queue up this task, this task, and this task, and continue here when they're ALL done." So when you're dealing with several tasks that might…
Comment linking /2016/05/28/goodbye-lua/
on “Using Lua coroutines to create an RPG dialogue system”This brings to mind Neil Rickert's "The Parable of the Two Programmers", which was published in the ACM SIG Software Engineering newsletter, January 1985. https://dl.acm.org/action/showFmPdf?doi=10.1145%2F1012443 for the original, or https://realmensch.org/2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-pro... for a reprint.
Comment linking /2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-programmers/
on “Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2002) [pdf]”"Install something else" is ... a nice idea? But it's simply not realistic. Examples: - Embedded devices that may or may not have an internet connection - Government classified networks that aren't allowed to grab ANY random software off of the internet - Simply not wanting to add another dependency to an operation. I'm a former Lua fan. I've ... written it off at this point. [1] Honestly if I were to take the appro…
Comment linking /2016/05/28/goodbye-lua/
on “The Case for Bash (2021)”