https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/culture/ Recent content in Culture on Hillel Wayne Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/theorem-prover-showdown/ Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/theorem-prover-showdown/ Functional programming and immutability are hot right now. On one hand, this is pretty great as there’s lots of nice things about functional programming. On the other hand, people get a little overzealous and start claiming that imperative code is unnatural or that purity is always preferable to mutation. I think that the appropriate paradigm is heavily dependent on context, but a lot of people speak in universals. I keep hearing that it’s easier to analyze pure functional code than mutable imperative code. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/right-tool/ Sun, 10 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/right-tool/ “Use the right tool for the job” is a pretty tired cliche. Mostly it’s used to dismiss overengineering and one-size-fits-all solutions to problems, like using microservices for your 10-user app. It isn’t a bad saying, it’s just tautologically true. I don’t think anybody wants to use the wrong tool for the job, unless they’re trying to sabotage it. “Should I use the right tool for the job?” is a rhetorical question. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/how-do-we-trust-science-code/ Mon, 14 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/how-do-we-trust-science-code/ In 2010 Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published Growth in a Time of Debt. It’s arguably one of the most influential economics papers of the decade, convincing the IMF to push austerity measures in the European debt crisis. It was a very, very big deal. In 2013 they shared their code with another team, who quickly found a bug. Once corrected, the results disappeared. Greece took on austerity because of a software bug. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/skepticism/ Fri, 09 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/skepticism/ There are a lot of curated lists out there about good programming resources. One thing they all have in common is that they’re focused on relatively mainstream ideas: good languages, good techniques, etc. I want to try something a little different and focus on the articles that are skeptical about what everybody believes in programming. To keep them “curated”, I tried to make sure that the articles were well-referenced or original research.