https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/rants/ Recent content in Rants on Hillel Wayne Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Wed, 05 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/problems-with-the-4doc-model/ Wed, 05 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/problems-with-the-4doc-model/ Two universal facts about user documentation: Documentation is really important. We are really bad at writing it. We don’t have good theories on what makes for useful documentation. That is except for the four document model, or Diátaxis.1 I’m glad that people use it. I’m also a little frustrated that people use it even when its inappropriate. My problem is that it’s not a universal or comprehensive model: there’s a lot of documentation people need to write that doesn’t neatly fit the model. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/alan-kay/ Wed, 22 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/alan-kay/ People keep claiming that modern OOP languages aren’t “really OOP” because they don’t follow Alan Kay’s definition of “OOP”. I can see the logic here, even if I disagree the conclusion. More recently I’ve seen people start claiming that Kay invented objects entirely. This is factually incorrect. Alan Kay did not invent objects. They come from Simula, which the Smalltalk-72 manual cites as a major inspiration (pg 117). The famous 1981 Byte magazine issue that popularized Smalltalk and OOP explicitly says “the fundamental idea of objects, messages, and classes came from SIMULA. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/divide-by-zero/ Fri, 10 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/divide-by-zero/ Have a tweet: img {border-style: groove;} I have no idea if Pony is making the right choice here, I don’t know Pony, and I don’t have any interest in learning Pony.1 But this tweet raised my hackles for two reasons: It’s pretty smug. I have very strong opinions about programming, but one rule I try to follow is do not mock other programmers.2 Programming is too big and I’m too small to understand everything. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/uncle-bob/ Thu, 05 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/uncle-bob/ A while back I wrote that Robert Martin was ruining software by being too good at programming. That was supposed to be a joke. Since then he’s done his damndest to actually ruin software by telling people they’re doing it wrong. His most recent response where he yells at software correctness was the breaking point for me, so I’m going to go ahead and say what many of us have been thinking: https://www.hillelwayne.com/10x/ Tue, 24 Jan 2017 12:37:25 -0600 https://www.hillelwayne.com/10x/ Let’s start with a couple of premises: There are 10x programmers out there, Some programming techniques are better than others. I don’t think either of these is particularly controversial. The first is pretty widely accepted and borne out by studies. And we see examples of the second everywhere: see for example all of the pissfights about static vs dynamic typing. We may not agree on which is better, but a lot of people think one of them is better, which means that a lot of people believe that some techniques are better than others. https://www.hillelwayne.com/hate-your-tools/ Tue, 27 Dec 2016 19:48:18 -0600 https://www.hillelwayne.com/hate-your-tools/