Politics and leadership is a responsibility. By avoiding it, you're setting a bad example. Once you know how an organization works, you should help lead it.

If we consider a family, you're essentially saying you'll only "do the work": brush teeth, feed kids, clean up, but not take on any responsibilities for the actual goals of the family. Not pushing to have your kids learn things, just executing somebody else's ideas, driving them to sports; not improving the living situation by perhaps investigating if you should get a bigger car. Nothing leading, only executing the ideas of your spouse.

I exaggerate of course, but there is something there.

You say that as if politics is optional. It isn't, decisions need to be made and politics is the process of making those decisions: who decides, and why.

In academia, for example, there is less politics because the publishing system sort of becomes the decision process. You apply with your ideas in the form of papers, the referees decide if your ideas are good enough (and demonstrated well enough) for the wider audience to even get to see. Then some politics, a popularity contest. But crucially this system famously leads to a LOT of resources being wasted, good research that never goes anywhere because nobody cares about it, or bad research that does nothing but everyone cares (cold fusion).

Politics is just a name for how we decide things. And yes, it sucks, but that's because we suck.

With this understanding of academia, you are perfectly suited to doing software development for them, because if you think there is "less politics" in academia, you are being foolish.

Academia is notorious for politics, especially around tenure and grants, scholarships, etc.

Publication politics are just a small part of that, but even there, working out which name goes in what order of the authorship of the paper is political.

Completely insane, who doesn't get to have coffee breaks without manager permission? Surely any org that treats its employees as adults would not have this problem.

I'll be honest, this code is easier to read for me without the comments. Also sorting feels like it's going to be slower than having some kind of set structure? You don't need ordering, just collocation of duplicates. If not or if it's a wash, that is also a good thing to comment. Also I'm not sure about the semantics of Go but it seems this mutates the argument AND returns a value, something I consider dangerous.

Otherwise I agree, people have a weird hang up about short variable names. Somehow not a problem in mathematics...

There's probably a better example. The point is sometimes the What needs explanation, and finding a better What isn't practical.

I have slightly unorthodox opinions about short variables. I used to hate them. Then I posted a question on one of the PL design forums - it might have been Reddit r/programminglanguages - why is there are history of single letter names for type variables? ie T, U, etc for generics. The answer I got back, was, sometimes you want code to focus on structure rather than identities. That stuck with me, because it helped me understand why so much C code (including Linux) code uses similar naming practices. Names can lie, and sometimes expressing the structure is the absolute critical thing.

Back when I programmed in Haskell, I also had a similar question about the extremely terse variable names that pop up everywhere. I'd wonder, why is this "x" and "xs" instead of "item" and "items" or "businessName" and "businessNames" or whatever. Eventually I found this (paraphrased) answer that made it all click:

The specificity or abstractness of a (variable) name relates to the values that it can hold. So when you have a very abstract function whose inputs can be of almost any type, naming those inputs in an overly-specific manner is an exact inverse of the failure of giving an overly generic to name highly constrained parameter.

Examples of correct naming:

  func firstWord(s string) string { ... }

  func bidShortcodePrefix(businessId string) string { ... }

Examples of incorrect naming:

  func firstWord(strWithOptionalSpaces string) string { ... }

  func bidShortcodePrefix(s string) string { ... }

All this said, I do agree with your original take on the comments. I much prefer having human-readable explanations inline with anyhow non-trivial code. If nothing else, they really make it easier to correctly fix the code if a bug is found much later.

Liberalism is a reductionist non-answer to realpolitik. See the sibling comment for what actual reasons there are.

Interesting deep dive. Can't say I understand the nuances really, and some of the Rust syntax looks incredibly arcane to me as an outsider.

(Author here) thanks! Even as an experienced Rust developer, this is a lot of syntax which is part of what makes it archaic I think.

As usual with Rust most of it is due to inherent complexity: for example, when you deal with raw pointers, you need to specify if they are const or mut, and you must have a syntax that’s not &, and not too wordy: so * is a good choice (might be changed to &raw in the future!). And if you want to say that something is generic and the generic parameter is a pointer… you just end up with a lot of syntax.

Actually a very interesting article! Didn't know he'd been selling this lie for so long.

You could use exactly the same rhetoric to make the opposite argument.

Sure, but you would be denying reality. Look at the political reality in Europe and the US.

How many countries are led by the far right? What about the far left?

Just because you don't see the "far left" doesn't mean it isn't there. Would you consider CDU in Germany to be conservative or even Christian right now? I've been far left all my life until I noticed how fake it all is. Sane goes for the right. now I'm just following truth. It's a lonely path.

All the best & I hope you had a Merry Christmas as well.

CDU is not far left. It's reducing immigration, reducing social services, and removing bike lanes to make more room for cars. Not things the left is known for - but they are things the right is known for.

The best thing the right has done to advance its cause is to convince so many people that the words "right" and "left" don't have actual meanings.

> How many countries are led by the far right? What about the far left?

Since you asked the question, I assume you have an answer, and I'm curious to hear it. I imagine it will reveal more about your personal politics than any observable political reality.

Double-replying to apologize for my previous comment! I saw what I felt was a leading question and answered it with a leading question in kind, but I got turned around reading the thread and realized much later that I actually agree with you and my answer would to your question would probably be more similar to yours than to the person you were replying to.

The good brand of open-source software is basically being abused to do basic rug pull schemes. Sad.

I think those people realize this, but it's a bit like global warming. They like their lifestyles.