Where do software programming jobs come from? The Tower of Babel (opens in new tab)

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1 pointszshrdlu3y ago4 comments

4 comments

I find this to be a poor analogy.

    humans do work
    they speak to other humans to coordinate
    speaking a different language lowers coordination bandwidth

    humans write programs
    they write programs in any language to produce any artifact

I dont see how the method of artifact production relates to coordination bandwidth

the purpose of programming languages isn't to facilitate communication with other humans, a source code artifact is isomorphic to a binary artifact, its purpose is to encode a description, like DNA.

> few people have had the time to do anything really sophisticated with software

zshrdluOP3y ago

I see what you mean, that's thoughtful. Not what I meant though - it's not really about coordination bandwidth but rather the that we're not optimally building upon each other's work. We're siloed.

rektide3y ago

The Babel situation, more than anything, is what makes the web so great. We have JavaScript to modify it, but the actual work product is a unified single language that we can express anything in.

The rest of computing puts code first, and code comes in infinite varieties. Different languages, different libraries giving us different vocabs, fp vs class based vs ecs for how paragraphs are built, hexagon vs ddd vs other architecture styles for how paragraphs are laid out.

Code is all varied. But we uave begun to have something better & greater, that everything can be built out of, and it comes first.

zshrdluOP3y ago

And it had to beat Java, Flash, etc to become the unified single language!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

4 comments

nh23423fefe3y ago

I find this to be a poor analogy.

    humans do work
    they speak to other humans to coordinate
    speaking a different language lowers coordination bandwidth

    humans write programs
    they write programs in any language to produce any artifact

I dont see how the method of artifact production relates to coordination bandwidth

the purpose of programming languages isn't to facilitate communication with other humans, a source code artifact is isomorphic to a binary artifact, its purpose is to encode a description, like DNA.

> few people have had the time to do anything really sophisticated with software

zshrdluOP3y ago

I see what you mean, that's thoughtful. Not what I meant though - it's not really about coordination bandwidth but rather the that we're not optimally building upon each other's work. We're siloed.

rektide3y ago

The Babel situation, more than anything, is what makes the web so great. We have JavaScript to modify it, but the actual work product is a unified single language that we can express anything in.

Code is all varied. But we uave begun to have something better & greater, that everything can be built out of, and it comes first.

zshrdluOP3y ago

And it had to beat Java, Flash, etc to become the unified single language!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse