A couple years ago I dubbed this trend "Flanders Computing" [1]. I haven't really given much thought about its origins, but it's probably got to do with the increasing demand for happiness that we Americans hold dear.
Collectively I think it's entered the American psyche that the answer to happiness is to avoid anything that makes us anxious or uncomfortable, which results in that toddler-level approach in many things. i.e. Ban things labeled "toxic", ban the boo-boos, keep everyone safe with happy feelings in this space only. But admittedly my thoughts are incomplete.
"The desire for more positive experience is in itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience."
from "The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck" by Mark Mason
The Enchiridion of Epictetus is a good place to start. You'll also learn how to feel when your favorite mug drops, or when a friend pokes your eye in a wrestling match - spoiler: the answer is not giving it a fuck (for lack of a better term).
"The problem is not that we want to be happy; it is that we want to be happier." Not my own observation. But I like it.
If that's a general principle, it implies that happiness can only be felt as an improvement over the past. That would also explain why sadness is necessary for us to be able to feel happiness, and why we're attracted to tragic art. Someone who is the same level of happy all the time will become numb to it, but constantly becoming happier is unsustainable in the same way as a drug addiction.
Yes. For examples of this trend, look no further than American college campuses, especially in the liberal arts.
"Microagressions", "safe spaces", ... it does sound like a lot of people feel untenably fragile when entering the marketplace of ideas.
I think your thoughts are incomplete. What they are missing is the knowledge of and empathy for people who are actually harmed by these behaviors.
Don't worry, most people asking for such bans don't have any real empathy for people who are actually harmed by these behaviors either.
And inversely, most people who are actually harmed, don't care for such bans, they prefer substantive and inherent (felt and voluntary) changes, not bans.
Let's not pretend there aren't plenty of cynics that employ woke culture to sinister ends.
(Obviously in actual critical work, the word western isn’t useful at all as it doesn’t have much meaning)
We did rebuild them, and McArthur is revered as a god, over there.
But they really have their own culture, and some aspects can strike us as quite strange (as, I am sure, some aspects of our culture weird them out).
I worked for a Japanese company, and went there, multiple times a year, for about twenty years (all Tokyo, so I can't speak for the rest of Japan). I think that there are a number of Japanese and US/EU expats that live in Japan, on this board.
While he's undeniably a famous historical figure in Japan, my impression is that the majority of Japanese people don't have any strong opinions about him. After all, how many people actually care so much about historical figures when they're busy watching cat videos on YouTube? But for the people who do have some interest, I assume many have mixed feelings on the matter, which is natural for citizens of a former military dictatorship turned democracy only because they lost the world war. The rest are far-right people who, as you can imagine, hate him with a passion, though I do hope they're only a minority of Japanese people whose voices are amplified by Twitter echo chambers.
I had several people point out his office on the top floor of a building facing the Emperor's Palace (some of the priciest real estate on Earth), in hushed, reverential tones.
I know that means I should leave the Internet, but I am right, usually because I am wrong, and learn differently.
None of us is “born right,” despite some people’s posturing.
Thanks for that.
Why? There's a reason Dugout Doug was fired during the Korean War. Guy was a menace.
When they talk to Americans, maybe.
It's my personal opinion that when we see such a discongreguity that we should perhaps choose other words.
What you're suggesting is basically using the etymological fallacy as a basis for changing words. Because of linguistic drift, a majority of words would have up be changed at some point - words like "nice" which came to mean their opposite, for example.
Choice of words is an individalized thing and language allows us to be as flexible as we like within still getting the point across. If I choose to say "European" instead of "western" when contrasting with indigenous Americans that sounds fine to me. If you don't make that same choice that's fine too. We'll all be understood.
Not really. Then we'd be changing terms established for centuries, that most people understand in their two contexts (geographical and cultural), with some new words we'd have to explain every time we use them -- so making things worse.
I wouldn't know if you mean "European culture" in the sense of something unique continental European (the way Europeans have unique cultural traits different from US traits, e.g. analytical vs continental philosophy), or the shared western culture Europeans and US Americans, and Australians, etc have?
Not really, only with extra context/explanation.
It's common to divide US/European culture (even though both western), or to include Japan in the western culture (even though not in the west, and their culture is not European of origin -- west in that sense is more like "westernized").
It also has a political/cultural meaning, which has some roots in geography, but is otherwise totally different.
Unfortunately “western” is now seen as the Abrahamic judeo-Christian capitalistic worldview, even though the west sprang out of pagan Greece and Rome.
The west "sprang out of pagan Greece and Rome" when they decided to become Christian. The actual pagans had been slowly abandoning paganism as a dead-end and turning more into esoteric religions and neo-planonism etc and the influence of Egyptian etc religions for several centuries before Christianism was a thing...
Other than not having the Christian religion, no, not really.
>Both cultures that honor seasonal cycles, animals, nature, ancestors, animism etc
"Both cultures" ? What cultures ? Neither pre-Colombian Americas nor Europe shared a culture on their respective side. Even if most of Europe shared a common Indo-European root, religious practices were varying widely. Be it from the cross-pollination with different tradition (pre-Indo-European, Semitic and whatnot) or social changes. It's very hard to argue the official Roman religion as practiced in cities was any more "closer to nature" than Catholicism is.
>the Abrahamic judeo-Christian capitalistic worldview
Any more grand words to force into that sentence ?
Making the Christian religion itself being the deciding factor in your reading of history is a position that's very... Christian.
That is to say, (again, roughly) - "modern, stable, (primarily) capitalist, democracies aligned with Western Europe/USA".
So, in the context of geopolitics and political ideologies many people still consider it to include Japan and South Korea. Yours truly included.
Not that I care as much about the "aligned with" part anymore, but certainly the "modern, stable, democracy" part.
I think people would be happier if they did think in terms of a six year old. There is nothing inherently "professional" about using drab and dull interfaces for coding and going to an office where you all dress in identical suits.
There is quiet satisfaction in achieving mastery like you mention, but (IMO) it should be accompanied by a pleasant feeling too. GitHub's cheerful, bright colors and interface enable that for me, and I'm grateful to them for it. GitLab and Bitbucket feel flat, dreary, and dull by comparison, honestly. It's like going to a brightly colored room with nice sofas v/s an all-grey room with a white desk. Which one are you going to be more productive in?
I think this is also why Slack is incredibly successful for something that is basically an IRC-in-browser implementation. It made work "fun" for a lot of people and thus steam-rollered opposers.
It's as if we're letting the jaded cynics of the world win.
by the way, the trending page is not everything about github!
i keep discovering and bookmarking github projects every now and then. for example, this repository where the author has implementations for trigonometry functions in k&r c: https://github.com/richgel999/triglib
i don't believe github has lost its quality either!
they recently pushed that new layout preview that made the app usable when my zoom level is at 150%. i was very happy about that. i can't wait for github to provide a better search engine. and i have the feeling that they are totally working on it :)
I agree that a lot of the recent changes to GH have been really cool. This article sort of makes me wish that features like the trending page were more configurable.
Any karma system (in this case GitHub stars) can be gamed, exploited, and used to generate hype.
I would be very glad if GitHub started moving away from that (although I have no clue what would replace it, if anything at all).
Maybe I'm just a little too old, but I've always rolled my eyes at those kinds of features and then ignored them. I find it impossible to imagine anyone actually caring about their badges or XP score on some company intranet wiki.
There’s a certain kind of manager that loves anything they can measure, however silly it is.
Plus many professional tools need to make use of every square centimetre on the display, and putting this "fun" cruft in it is going to detract from the usefulness of the tool because it now can't accommodate all the necessary UI elements.
The jobs in one corner vs. fun in another usually creates a system where everything that’s fun is unfortunately useless, from a professional perspective.
And some people like that! They want to work for 8 hours and make memes/play games the rest of the time. They don’t miss the “lost” time at all.
But some of us really want to convert that useless time into something useful. You can hate us if you want, but I don’t think we are necessarily wrong to want this.
Example: I just don’t have enough time. I’m noticing now that when I take even 30 minutes off, in terms of my productivity- it hurts. I’ve personally concluded that the concept of “free time” just doesn’t apply to me, and I don’t really have any.
Another example: at a certain level, given the right approach, probably anything can be fun. Physics can be fun! Linear algebra can be fun! But you know as well as I do that when people talk about fun colloquially, they never mean linear algebra. So pushing back on what is “fun” exactly can have big on the job benefits.
In this context, switching 30 minutes over from “mindless entertainment” to “somewhat professionally useful entertainment” is a massive win. Enough to get me to stop doing one thing and do something else, actually.
I would guess a lot of people on Twitter would be in the same boat, based on how they use it.
Depends what you mean by "western society". A good chunk of Europeans I knew (including in Eastern Europe where I live) share the same mindset as your parent poster: a version control is just a tool and it is gauged on the basis of how much it helps you in your work. Absolutely zero fun factor required. We just want it to be useful and not get in the way (which, admittedly, Git itself isn't quite good at).
(II) I'm not a progressive politically, but Western Society has generally improved. Bigger McDonalds meals that make you fatter is "improved" too under the logic of the market. Because developers are relatively scarce, a greater share of this improvement goes to what they want (whereas in burger flipping, the share gone to better golf clubs for execs is comparatively larger).
(III) There's something about law enforcement that attracts a certain kind of personality. I was never drawn to LEO (as a cop, bail bondsman, mall security, anything) because I don't have these personality traits. The same goes for computer programmers. There's certainly a childish trait going on that isn't present in Mad Men's Don Draper (but then, who knows if this guy existed); the web itself gravitates to a light, rounded, primary-colors visual language. I think in part there's a whiz-kid dynamic where many of us were much much more capable than adults in a moment of extraordinary technology shift (the introduction of the internet), whereas in previous generations adults knew better and youngsters wanted to emulate them. ("Never trust anyone over 30" has been around for a long time, but it was an angry sentiment, whereas now 40-year-olds are welcome to emulate whiz-kids if they still have it).
Yes, it is childlike, but there is no shame in that-- if anything, history is proving more and more that the generations who maintained that everything must be as repetitive and miserable as possible had no idea what they were talking about-- and are now dying with active diagnoses of dementia and Alzheimer's.
Among other things, these emotions are addictive and are tracked indirectly via engagement metrics.
"Fun" is a very poor imitation of "zen" or "peace" (the Christian concept) or "enlightenment" (the Buddhist concept), but has become sort of the sine qua non of secular Western democratic capitalist societies.
If nobody does it, it would be fine. If everybody does it, then we're worse off than before. But if some do it, and others don't, then the ones who do it win big.
I've looked at some tools used by Google - mailing lists, Gerrit, etc - none of those look fun. For a casual like me, fun is important.
I don't do much with open source because I don't have the headspace, willpower or persistence to contribute much so the discussion is a bit wasted on me, but I've used both Github, Gitlab and Stash (Atlassian) for work projects; the feedback loop that tools like this give is super important to me.
I never once thought "Sourceforge is boring". I thought they became villains.
I feel like it was more like: their offerings were no longer unique, the original team probably moved on, they couldn't make money, and they turned to desperation.
I feel that at some point GH decided to distance themselves from the social aspect of the platform, but I still cling to it.
There are two sides to github consumption - active and passive.
On passive side - we are happy to stick to basics of git on CLI / IDE and get the job done of a version control. And the site is usually to configure CI/CD and so on.
However on active consumption of open source - it is all about discovery of repos relevant to tech you are into and people behind them. It is so amazing to go and find a good committer profile and see what repos he follows.
And the new github trending is simply axing their own feet here.
1. A git-aware Google Drive, where I could stick version-controlled code I wanted to sync between computers and possibly share with colleagues (and also create a paper trail if someone beats me to the bunch publishing something, ha)
2. As a CDN serving open-source projects I depended on, but discovered almost exclusively by other means
None of my GitHub-hosted code ever had a README.md, I never starred anything, and I often never even visited the repos I depended on (their documentation would be hosted elsewhere and copying-and-pasting the GH URL from there was all I needed to do to depend on it). If I visited an Issues page, it was because I got there through googling an error message, not because I went there through GH's UI.
This Drive / CDN usage pattern is sort of the baseline, "passive" level of engagement with GH imo.
I'm glad that others have fun with open source and follow along and contribute to projects. It's amazing and it has benefitted me directly with the libraries I use. But as far as the social pressure of needing to be active on Github, for a while that seemed like it might become an expectation for all programmers. And I'm very glad that it seems to be on the decline now.
Edit: and as far as browsing for new libraries and solutions to use in a project, I guess I haven't ever found Github to be very useful for that. There's no easy way to judge the quality of a library, I have come across a lot of things that oversell themselves in the README and are very buggy and incomplete, as well as a lot of things that are maybe used in a small niche in production and very battle hardened but don't currently have a large active community. For me, Twitter and blogs or other discussion forums have been a much higher signal way to find libraries with the reviews of people actually vouching for them as being solid and broadly useful.
I am almost exclusively a Principal author of my work; with dozens of repos, and six figures of LoC (probably seven figures, if we include the code not available in public repos). I think I may have one forked repo; an embedded Web server library that I needed to tweak a bit to make work for my ffmpeg wrapper project.
This is not necessarily a good thing. By authoring my own code, I limit my scope. People who rely heavily on dependencies can have awesome results.
But they need to be very careful about the provenance and quality of these dependencies.
Dependency discovery is an important part of the vetting process. If we have choices, we don’t need to settle for second-best.
Also, I know that, for many folks, learning is a driver for repo discovery.
A lot of forks can indicate an inquisitive and open-minded approach to software development.
I do support it; but it is not how I work.
The projects can have interesting code to read or just show off a cool idea or a different way of implementing something than I'm used to.
Disclaimer: Just a happy sourcegraph user.
[1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_11#_text-search-imp...
But that's just it. It's a bit of limelight. I'm thankful for the interest I've received, but that's all it is, really; it's validation from fellow programmers. It furthers your career in one or two aspects, just like Instagram fuels your self image, or prospects of influencing. But like Instagram, one can chase the limelight their whole life. Ego stroking is addictive. I urge those who come into a bit of limelight to enjoy it, but to stay humble and focus on delivering what you set out to do, not to bask in your temporory moment of glory.
Yeah, seeing the headline of this article made me think of how I've never heard a carpenter exclaim what fun it is to use a cordless drill.
Strange analogy. Many people go into carpentry because they like working with power tools. It's fun.
Programming is the same. Many of us were drawn to it because we like it. It's fun.
If you go through life doing a job that you don't enjoy a tiny bit, you're going to be miserable. Why not have some fun?
GitHub is a well-designed tool for multiple use cases. One aspect was the 'Social Programming' as they were marketing it back then. Trending, stars, fork counts were feeding into that aspect. Even the Issue tracker is a kinda social feature.
I find GitHub as a tool is still a fun/joy/handy to use...if only they fixed the odd bug in mobile view that requires me to refresh several times before it loads the styling files.
I also interact mostly via desktop tools.
But I have been writing open-source code for twenty years. An open repo site is quite useful for that workflow.
It's clear that Github has changed the trending section to push api's of the big players.
I'm an Apple native developer. We aren't usually high on anyone's list.
It also has a great API, and people have written some nice tools for it. The API is probably not unique (or even the best one), but it is well-supported by third parties.
You're doing the thing you love most in all the world, surrounded by people who feel the same way.
You've gotten every perk known to man from ping pong to free booze.
You're getting paid handsomely, more than any other humans on the planet.
You've created a buffer zone between yourself and the client that could withstand a rocket blast from a scud missile
And you are allowed to wear whatever adolescent threads you choose up to and including socks, sandals cargo shorts and a spiderman T shirt ..
Yet you're not having fun and you still call it a job?
CydeWays honestly what more could anyone wish for? Isn't it enough that you've bucked every professional convention? Aren't you satisfied with the greatest free lunch in the history of human enterprise?
Could it be that all these enticements are what's actually robbing you of the fun you so certainly deserve?
Who knows maybe I've read one too many Aesop's fables.
> You're doing the thing you love most in all the world, surrounded by people who feel the same way.
The thing I love most is understanding ideas and solving cool problems. Would have stayed in academia if the jobs,job security and money were there. There is plenty of problem solving but it's not an everyday occurrence.
> You've gotten every perk known to man from ping pong to free booze.
Might get some free booze at company events. We have ping pong at our yearly BBQ.
> You're getting paid handsomely, more than any other humans on the planet.
Definitely not true.
> You've created a buffer zone between yourself and the client that could withstand a rocket blast from a scud missile
I'm emailing or on the phone with clients on a weekly basis.
> And you are allowed to wear whatever adolescent threads you choose up to and including socks, sandals cargo shorts and a spiderman T shirt ..
This one's true.
But then again you most likely refuse to dress up for it, amiright?
And you'll throw every prevarication in the book at me as to why dressing up for work isn't necessary.
And I'll tell you that's employee mentality talking.
And you'll say but I'm an engineer.
And I'll say dressing up is fun, for children and adults alike
And you'll say fun has no place at a job.
And try as you might despite all of your engineer's training you won't be able to see there are more than three ways to frame any context.
CydeWays, I like you don't get me wrong.
We go about claiming that we're not saving lives and then we invest our entire existence on this earth towards things that aren't fun? We're going further than not saving lives bro, we're wasting lives.
By now you still haven't noticed that casual culture is a poor substitute for no fun and you're stuck treating your job like a job, so what exactly is the upside?
Git is a tool, yes. But GitHub is “social coding”, which should at least be a little fun.
Umm...yes. Yes, I did. Be nice.
I understood what the author was saying. I never wrote that I disagreed with it; just that I viewed it through a different lens.
It appears that I am not alone in using this lens.
MS used be "new, shiny," but now, they are "blue chip."
I don't equate their properties with "fun," but I do believe they are serious about "let's get some work done," which jives with my lens.
FWIW, I see GitLab and Bitbucket as more focused on the tooling and business-first aspects.
And since creating my first repo there, I’ve always seen GitHub as a social platform for gaining notoriety within the open source community.
That said, I have never thought about it as the fulcrum for social networking along those lines. I have considered developer communities, like this one, or specialized ones, as places to connect, and GH as a "gallery," where we can send people to view our portfolio, after we have connected, or to "vet" contacts, like employers.
My experience with GH, is that the folks that really generate the most energy, are the JavaScript/Python/Full-Stack communities. I am an Apple software specialist, and there's not really the same energy, in that community, on GH, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I don't see it the same way as JS folks.
Most of my GH interaction is through my desktop system, not a browser (pushing and pulling checkouts).
I’ve been using some form of source control for nearly 30 years (since Projector, in the 1990s). It’s a tool. A very, very important tool.
I appreciate many of the “glossy” features of GH, like hero images and GH Pages, but this shows how “out of touch” I must be, because I have never considered it to be a social venue or competitive arena.
It’s just a place I keep my code. I’m quite grateful for it.