Open Thread

Open Thread #72

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85 thoughts on “Open Thread #72

  1. Has anyone of you watched the PlayStation 5 reveal? I think I’m done with gaming, maybe with the exception of Nintendo. Gaming is supposed to be an escapist activity but how is that supposed to work when they shove “equal representation” down your throat. When it comes to avatars in video games, the white man has already become a minority. It’s blacks, unattractive women, and anthropomorphic animals out the wazoo. My biggest disappointment was the announcement of Returnal by Housemarque. It looks great and the premise, apparently it’s some kind of rogue-like action shooter with loot dynamics, is a sold one, but who wants to play as a middle-aged butt-ugly woman? This is just utterly bizarre. (EDIT: I just read someone describe the protagonist as “Hillary Clinton in a spacesuit”. That’s about right. I think “Space Karen” is even better.)

    Oh, and to hammer home how creatively bankrupt this industry is, we’re getting GTA V again, after the original release on PS3 and the remaster on PS4. This was the opener of the reveal stream, which briefly turned me into a sobbing Pepe. Sony couldn’t have found a bigger downer for the opening if they tried. Oh wait, there was also a total turd, Goodbye Volcano High, which seems to promote transgenderism and furry fandom. That would have been worse than GTA V, but not by that much.

    1. Lmao! I haven’t watched the reveal yet, but I think I’ll pass if that’s what they’re putting front and center. I’m still thinking Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be quite good, and there will be games that aren’t narrative driven up the ass and they will probably fare better on the market. There’s still a handful of promising developers. However, from what you say, I think it’s quite surprising that Sony would reveal their latest hardware with such subpar material. Who green lit this? Surely not the Japanese branch?

    2. I was expecting GTA VI and some Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay. Instead, I got GTA V, minorities, women, and bizarre indie games, for the most part. I’m still not over that Housemarque game with the 60-year-old ugly white woman in the spacesuit who’s handling weapons like a pro. The timeline we live in is incredibly fucked up. If we lived in a sane world, a concept like that would have had people getting laughed out of a room and then summarily dismissed.

    3. At least skip through it. Some of the games shown have very nice ray-tracing effects. Overall, there was just way too much fillter in that presentation.

    4. Wasn’t interested in a single game shown outside of Gran Turismo 7, and who knows when that’ll be out. That conference pretty much solidified that I won’t be buying a PS5 at launch. Most of those games look like they could have been on PS4.

    5. I checked out the Returnal trailer. That has to be one of the least inspiring and unlikely protagonists of all time. You can at least take an elderly man and make him badass, but never make a post menopausal female believably awesome or attractive.

      The Resident Evil Village trailer looks good. It kind of gives off an RE4 atmospheric vibe. Also, Japan Studios’ remake of Demon Souls looks pretty neat, even though I never got into those games. I’m surprised we didn’t see some Call of Virtue or something already (as far as I know.)

    6. RE8 does indeed give off RE4 vibes. I’m interested in getting a VR headset at some point, so RE7 and RE8 are probably great to play that way. There are rumors of a PSVR2 coming out, so that may indeed be reason enough to get a PS5 as a PC VR setup is more expensive and more of a hassle to set up. Well, we shall see. I’m past the point where I buy a game console because some great game might come out. Normally, a good point to jump in is three years into the lifecycle of a console.

      The Demon’s Souls remake trailer I didn’t like. I played the PS3 original only for a few hours because I’m a filthy casual, but I saw enough of the game to make me appreciate the art style. With the remake, they added a ton of details just to fill the screen, which completely changes the atmosphere, and not for the better.

    7. I actually liked the show…I thought the design of PS5 was nice, although would still prefer a darker version.

      The games, were marketed fairly well, and will create a buzz. But with all these show offs, what looks good in a trailer does not translate into a good game. Remember Order 1866 on PS4??

      I will wait till the games come out and reviews and demos are seen before I buy it.

      Think the big thing is the loading times and improved graphics, but I doubt we will see anything good until devs get more time pushing the machine.

      I was sad there was no uncharted, or red dead

      The graphics are great, and Ratchet and clank looks good especially with speed of transitions

      The were no big games that caught my eye, I played spiderman and it was brilliant, but got bored near the end (too repetitive), so the new one will be just the same.

      Hitman looks decent, but it is just same game with upgrade graphics.

      I liked the look of Kena, kind of reminds of rayman

      I used to play gran turismo 2, and only had the 24 hour races to complete, but later versions put me off due loading times so maybe this might be a change

      Oddworld, looks good, a classic which would be good to play

      Little Devil Inside and Stray looks intriguing, but with the former, this looks like it could be a PS4 game. But could be good.

      Maybe Solar Ash will be like Journey (which i rate a possibly the best game i have played) hopefully it is.

      Another good thing, which I hope is true, is ps4 backwards compatibility.

      I agree there are a lot of games with dodgy characters, and scripts with bullshit agendas. Hopefully, economics will show that these games will not make much money.

      But take my opinion with a pinch of salt, I play mainly jrpgs and fifa mainly :). Well now playing red dead and fifa

    8. The Order 1886 got some backlash, but I quite liked it. It’s a really nice third-person shooter with some intense fights closer to the end. The shooting mechanics are solid. On the other hand, the walking sequences and quick-time events weren’t particularly fun. I got it cheaply and I think I got my money’s worth out of it.

      I’d say the next big step is ray tracing, and we’ve seen some nice examples of it in the PS5 reveals stream. Gran Turismo 7, for instance, looked phenomenal, for instance.

    9. I learned my lesson about buying the first wave of consoles with the PS2. I’m inclined to think that part of their high sales success is due to repeat buyers.

      I’m looking forward to Metroid Prime 4 and the BotW sequel on Switch. I’ll be able to sit tight for a while. I believe Metroid is going to push the console’s capabilities to the limit. I hope they show it off soon.

    10. I’d wait a looooong while before getting a VR. I had one and gave it away. Once you get past the initial “WOW” factor, it will just collect dust. There really aren’t any major killer-apps for it, and 95%+ of the games just feel like tech demos; there just isn’t enough meaty content. Also, the setup is cumbersome, and it’s next to near impossible to play any of the games that allow full 360 movement without getting dizzy after ten or so minutes. Skyrim is beautiful in VR, but you have to put it down after around ten minutes because of the way movement works.

    11. Have you tried Firewall: Zero Hour or Resident Evil 7? I haven’t, but from what I’ve read, those two are the most compelling experiences. There is also Half-Life: Alyx, but for this game you’d need a more expensive PC setup.

    12. Offtopic: Has anyone of you played sniper elite 4? Man I loved that game, sniping Nazis for hours on end. I made a challenge for myself, clearing an entire level (and they are huge) without saving, on highest difficulty. But never managed to succeed 🙂 Only one time I got really close, then I gave up on the challenge as it was too time consuming.

      but related to that: anyone else pissed of by the massive dumbing down of video games? e.g. Red dead redemption2.. the gameplay of that game boils down to “go to X marker on the map, kill few people (with autoaim), repeat”. You could literally play that game with a 50 IQ

    13. This is a very unfortunate trend indeed. In previous games, you only had a marker on a map. Today, it’s quite common to have some kind of marker in the game world, which you only have to follow. Those games literally put you on rails. I find them rather insulting. I did not bother to get Red Dead Redemption 2 as I’ve had my fill of modern games. The last mainstream game I played was The Witcher III. In that game, you can activate your “Witcher sense”, which highlights a foggy trace that leads you exactly to where you have to go.

      I find gaming less and less interesting. I think I only played four big games in the seven or eight years: Red Dead Redemption (the first one), GTA V, The Witcher III, and Dragon Quest XI. I’m looking forward to Dragon Quest XII, which hasn’t even been announced yet, but I’m quite lukewarm towards Cyberpunk 2077.

    14. I haven’t played any of the more recent VR games because I gave my VR away. Opting out until the next generation of VR headsets. The tech is amazing, but just isn’t there yet. They need to fix the screen door effect, motion sickness, and get a lot more mainstream games that amount to more than just tech demos. It reminds me of those pre-SNES 3D graphics (Think Star Fox) where they had all of these weird arcades with gimmicks like hologram 3D and later FMV games on PSX. You are amused when you first experience it, but get over it and see it for the gimmick it is pretty quickly.

    15. @cani
      I doubt you need an IQ higher then 110-115 to write decent code in 90% of the jobs around. You need much higher if you work in some niche field , the domain require an high level of abstraction and the code quality is important for the business. Most of the programming tasks around require no more then understanding the architecture and tweak the code to fit in what is already written. Modern programming is take piece of systems and patch them together. How many developer there are in the world? How many of them have written from scratch a web server, a driver, a 3D graphic engine, a DB server, a piece of OS? I think very few in percentage. If you work for a project that require write something from scratch where scaling and performance is crucial maybe yes, an IQ higher of 130 probably is needed.
      I have always used the programming language as a way to cut out shitty job, C++ was my first programming language because I was interested in system and low level programming and I thought I could find interesting projects. Well for my first job I end up in a company doing military projects. I was sure to meet smart people, but in the end I found out just a small percentage was doing interesting stuff (maybe 1-2 % of all the employees writing the core framework), the others were cutting and pasting code and writing the worst code I ever saw in my life.

    16. Feel free to elaborate on how you find good jobs. I think working for a consulting company almost guarantees that you’ll get horrible projects. Otherwise, it’s probably more a function of domain and company size, e.g. a small FinTech startup probably has more interesting work to offer than a large insurance company or bank.

    17. @Aaron
      This a tough question I don’t have even an clear answer for myself but I will try to elaborate. My strategy changed during the years, starting from idealistic geek to a high class escort, just give me the money. I understood late how money give you freedom to choose, anyway I would say programming language, everything that is mainstream is a big no. I would not exclude Java completely if you are going to work for some open source project sponsored by big corporation, that it could be interesting but very unlikely. A big no for banks and insurance company, the crazy process will kill you. Big corporation I would choose only the FAANG at the beginning of the career, get a solid basic of good software engineering, get some good money and then move on. Some years at Google will attract recruiters like a drunken bitch in a club looking for some cocks. At that point you are in a position of power and you can start to choose for interesting project, choose a niche business and programming languages, participate to the community and the open source, go to conference, make networking create some project or pull request to existing one and try to contact the company that use the language itself, during the time Go starting to get some users all the library had to be built from scratch, there were good opportunity to be noticed. As anecdote I remember when I lived in Spain for a shitty project but well paid, I went for interview in Marbella and they were working in Ocaml for the core of the system, people were quite smart indeed and they crashed me during the interview . In general I would say go for a functional language will give you better job opportunity but the competition will be much higher, less job opportunity and in general smarter people to compete with. Even if the people are smart, business is interesting, company is medium size you still can’t know if the process is broken or not. There is a high probability then a medium/small company has a completely broken process or not at all, or the people are smart but not collaborative, or managers are incompetent. Understanding during the interview if a company culture is not completely broken is a skills itself. In the end I decided to freelance project by project in east Europe as the best strategy at the moment, no string attached, no fucking politics, get higher salary at least 50% or more. During the time I was looking for pussy daily it was a paradise, in Sofia I could get 5000 euro/month and pay 250 euro for apartment and getting a good amount of pussy easily.

  2. Hey to all you programmers, what is your stand on TDD, BDD and DDD when it comes to software development?

    I’ve already asked about DDD before and Aaron said it’s another way of selling snake oil.

    I am starting new job as I’ve lost my last one. I’ve had two concrete offers, but one was much better financially – 750 euros more per month. In Poland that’s money that lots of people earn per month. And I chose this one, although I have some fears about this way of software development.

    Beside this guys from my team seems to be helpful and friendly.

    1. BTW. Which programming language will become more popular in the next 5 years?

      I am now commercial Java developer, but would like to switch to another language/platform in 2 years. I am thinking about Scala or Erlang, although there is no much job advertisement about the latter as for now.

    2. I think Scala is your best bet, not just in comparison to a niche language like Erlang but in general.

    3. Any place that dogmatically follows those methodologies you may want to avoid. They hinder more than help. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t write tests or consider user behavior. DDD is an immediate red flag because that’s used in OOP and that paradigm invariably rots your brain.

    4. Could you explain why you think OOP rots your brain? Isn’t it a good way to reuse pieces of code developed previously in a clean way? Also, it seems like a good way to organize your code so that others can follow it better.

    5. You’re talking about theoretical OOP, the kind some professor who hasn’t written production code in 20 years tells you about in Programming 101. In contrast, there is real-world OOP that is aptly referred to as “spaghetti with meatballs”. When you look at a module in a large OOP application, you can’t properly reason about it because of interdependencies with other modules due to mutability, which can be a pain to track down. In contrast, in a language like Haskell or Scala/scalaz, you’ll look at a bunch of pure functions and you know exactly what you’re dealing with. You won’t encounter bullshit like some leftovers from a botched refactoring that change some variables in your “clean and organized” OOP application, which only shows up in production and not in your nice unit tests. (Writing Haskell for a living is a really sweet gig if you get it.)

    6. I agree with Aaron. OOP was a big mistake of marketing that grow in an environment where programming was difficult and the big corporation needed some easy approach to divide complexity between people in teams. Java was born, the big marketing made the rest. The original concept of OOP was from Alan Key and beautifully implemented in Smalltalk, where the central idea was message passing that doesn’t mean take a object and add a . to function call but more abstract way. Some of that ideas actually interesect with Actor model and implemented in Erlang and later in Akka in Scala. That original ideas were corrupted in the Java version of OOP, take C++ remove the complexity of pointers and memory management, simplify the sintax, use a threading model of the 80′ and here you have Java, at the same time the famous book of design pattern came out to solve the issue created by the paradigm itself (why there isn’t a book of design patter for functional programming?).
      If you are interested in Erlang you can try Elixir, it is pratically a modern Erlang (use the same VM), I don’t like it is not strong typed I would like to see a strong typed Erlang derived language. If you have never used functional programming language Scala is quite complex but there are more job offer then Elixir or Erlang.
      If we are coming back to performance centrality after the bullshit of scripting language of the 2000′ I would bet Rust could be a good bet.

    7. The problem with programming is that you need people who are reasonably smart. With a bloated language like Java you only artificially lower the barrier of entry, though, and the result is absolutely horrible software. I’ve met such programmers a few times in my life. Their issue is that they cannot form proper abstractions, yet they are oblivious to how needlessly complicated their design is. Then they go ahead full steam and create absolute monstrosities. They don’t know where to start, so they just start with a new class file, write some boilerplate code, and go from there. It is truly mind-boggling the first time you see it.

      Akka is only an imperfect emulation of Erlang-style message passing, by the way.

      Regarding your note on Rust: Go seems to have a greater market share as well as mindshare. Scripting languages are fine for smaller tasks. What I find absurd is that people are building large systems with them and once those systems get too difficult to maintain, they develop tools to make their mess more manageable.

    8. “Hey to all you programmers, what is your stand on TDD, BDD and DDD when it comes to software development?”

      We use TDD and BDD as a given within our company. Test first does have many benefits, thinking about the api and who uses it, writing simplest code which you want and does the bare minimum and not adding extra code, testing behaviour, creating seam (injecting dependencies which can be mocked/stubbed as they more prone to changes), a good habit for writing tests and looking to refactor code, Bdd can be used a acceptance criteria and be prevetted by business/testers to decide if this functionality should be implemented

      But being anal about, is not great, if I wrote a BDD test which covers a happy path, I would not write a unit test (tdd) for the behaviour.

      Also if I was writing a simple method or class, I would write the code first them write the tests. But if it got more complex, I would write the test first.

      Testing is totally necessary and all code should have them.

    9. This only works if you know exactly where you’re going. If your work is exploratory in nature, writing a bunch of tests in advance is normally just a waste o time as you’ll end up modifying your tests as you’re writing your code. Obviously, this doesn’t mean you should never write any tests at all.

    10. “I’ve already asked about DDD before and Aaron said it’s another way of selling snake oil.”

      With a lot things in tech, they come in fashion, are used, have problems and then discarded and then cycle comes back again. It is only when big companies invest in tech, solves the problems makes useful etc then it stays. Or it solves a completely new problem and people take it upon themselves to maintain the solution.

      DDD is akin to some snake oil, it has a lot of buzz words. The guy who wrote the book and other books written on it, are massive. But all it is, is a design pattern for a project’s architecture to handle complex business rules. We have used it in one of our projects to handle several business flows that last for a couple of days (for the customer journey to be complete), this involved using event sourcing, cqrs, aggregates and bounded contexts. All we did is make sure that business logic did not leak to other flows, events were structured and following some rules (cannot happen before another event etc), kept all data (no deletion or updating data – have a paper trail and can replay flows).

      You might say why not use an event streaming tech like kafka, well I work for a massive international company, and politics, sercuity, legal, money all comes into play.

      Wether we used DDD to the correct specs is open to debate, but we used some features and adapted, we kept it simple

      Plus DDD is not really used in the big tech companies from what I have heard so you need. So is it really that useful to implement something so complex, get in consultants, and be stuck with something following a dogmatic approach if other big companies dont use it??

      A lot of people use tech, ideas or create tech as a means of selling their consultancy/expertise so that you can use it, think of agile. When in fact you can easily do it yourself, and take what is good and adapt what is useful and not use what you dont want.

    11. Dude, companies with heavy regulatory requirements do use kafka. I bet your PM told you a bunch of bullshit or just doesn’t know what he’s doing. Then again, reimplementing a poor version of a tool that already exists is great for job security.

    12. @Michał

      Remember you work for a company, one that people have vested interests, people who have the influence and position to enforce design and engineering amd tech desicions. In the end you work there, you might be able to change people’s decisions and use something new but it can be very hard to do so, especially due to politics, legal, money etc. You can always create a prototype, in your spare time, which shows the benefits (ie saves or makes money as the end goal) of using some new tech or idea. But most of the time it might not be worth it.

      I would do the work, if you stay there long enough to get enough influence (which you need to build through your opinions, your ability, experienece , position etc) then you can change things. Otherwise, change jobs to someplace which will listen to your voice, but even then choices might be made in majority vote, and most people in tech are into “Resume driven development” and like to try new shiny things. Or start your own company with it’s own product.

      At the end of the day, a lot of software is about opinions. Most ideas will work if you have money and time and ability of people to implement it. But people disagree and need someone (hopefully some good) will have to decide (and decide in a logical manner and not pander to people). Remember a lot of choices have trade offs, part of coding is to push those choices to edge and so that they can be easily changed (ie using dependency inversion). Other changes we cannot change easily and require entire rewrites, ie using a language.

      Sorry am rambling now

    13. @Michał

      “Which programming language will become more popular in the next 5 years?”

      I am a java developer, and once you learn one language you basically now the basics of learning any other language. Yes syntax will be different but that is a small thing to handle.

      Obviously other things like programming paradigms will be different too, but they should not be too hard to get round.

      But to be an expert in a language will take sometime, and being in the java ecosystem is not a bad place to be. It is used by many companies, it is always evolving, backed by a massive company (even the free versions are too), companies can trust it not to break with new updates and no costly rewrites (backwards compatability), uses the jvm and has good tooling (jmx, jconsole etc), very mature and lots of good libraries/frameworks. Plus a lot business will not spend money on a rewrite on an application to a new language if there is not really benefit (money) as it will cost money.

      Plus being in the jvm, is acutally pretty good, you can use scala, clojure (lisp derivate functional programming language), kotlin (has a lot more FP features, leaner than java and getting traction as used in android). I would suggest learning using these, probably kotlin (as not hard to migrate from java), but it is still very young but you can use java libraries with it. Clojure is a good language, but not many jobs (but this means being paid more). Scala I have a couple of apps written in them in my team, it is nice functional language, again not as popular but more popular than clojure, but scala can be written very badly.

      If you looking for job secruity, then choose a super popular language, like javascript/typescript and node, python, C# and .net…it’s dependent on what jobs are there. Or going to fields that are booming, like machine learning, IOT, app development.

      In my opinion there is enough opportunties in java to make a good living. I believe the better route is to learn more about how to scale projects, understanding devops (CI/CD, deployemnts, kubernetes, docker, cloud providers etc) and how to build apps for these and how to use this to engineer non functional requriements (ie modifiability, maintainability, availability, security, interoperability, performance, usability, testability etc etc). Basically, creating and designing application with the big picture invovled (time, scope, users etc) and across teams and over the full devops cycle.

    14. I fully disagree with your claim that a different paradigm shouldn’t be a problem for a developer. You’ll come around the first time you see, for instance, a Haskell program written by a Java guy who churned out 500+ lines across multiple files instead of a small number of functions that could do the same in less than 50 lines. They are mentally so inflexible that they abuse the language they are using to fit the one language and paradigm they know.

      The problem with the big mainstream languages is that you’re competing against a glut of mediocre programmers and, often, companies just need another mediocre programmer for their team. In contrast, if you focus on Scala or F#, you’re in a niche and, most likely, you’ll make more money. On top, it is very likely that you’ll have smarter colleagues, which will make work more fun. If you want security, it’s better to be very hard to replace. That won’t work with Java at all. On the other hand, imagine you wrote COBOL for a living! You would have a really sweet gig.

    15. @AaronSleazy

      I agree OOP is not great, but polymorphism is actually very useful. Most people write bad OOP as you explained. Writing immutable objects, using a clear layered architecture so dependencies are easier to follow, using interfaces to understand api and invert dependencies, extract changeable code to dependencies (using constructor injection) all help code become easier to reason about. Plus using functional aspects in your code ie pure functions, immutable objects, pipes and filters, monads, monoids, function as first class objects, pattern matching, tail head recursion also helps but this depends on you current language capabilities and your own habits (cannot think of the word) to implement it and stick with it (writing tests helps but using the compiler to enforce it is better). Java does have some these features in java8.

      If you are new to a language, say doing scala and you write code tha works but is not written well it can be very hard to work with. You need to work in a company with experienced devs who will pair and code review you work.

      Haskell is a nice language,I used it in university. But this is not a popular language, and might be hard to get jobs in. Scala would be better, but I do like clojure as lisp is a nice language.

      I have not used erlan/elixir, but it is very good esp for concurrent users, I believe that whatsapp was written in it.

    16. @DrDivago

      OOP did leave a lot to be desired, and the problems writing good code led to design patterns book. If we still lived in the functional world a lot of these problems with OOP would be gone. But design ideas still applpies to both FP and OOP, things like cohesion and open closed principle. But using both is useful, and dependent on the problem being solved.

      I have always liked FP, it’s my first paradigm I learned when learnign to program for the first time, I used SML, then later Haskell and Lisp at uni. It makes code very nice easy to use. Although when working with maps and filters on data structures, they can sometimes lead to complex code and hard to reason about, when a simple for loop with mutation would make it simple.

      I agree strongly typed languages are must, and also compiled languages too. Leaving an app till when it is run to see an error in not great (but if you have good testing then that helps prevent this)

      Rust is interesting, I have heard this might be taking over C, maybe a good language to learn if getting into embedded systems, IoT and high performance systems. But again very new and a lot of things would need to written for it compared to C and it’s extnesive libraries.

      Scripting lang is good, but only for certain things not prodcution level stuff. I would not bother learning this for anything but automating tasks to help in building the prod apps.

      I believe that the actor model, can be used in java via vertx to help with multithhreaded/async operations, but dont know too much about it.

    17. “Dude, companies with heavy regulatory requirements do use kafka. I bet your PM told you a bunch of bullshit or just doesn’t know what he’s doing”

      I agree kafka is used all over the place, it was created for linkedin, but when politics and legal people get involved and say no, then there is not much you can do but come up with an alternative design. We cannot wait for legal to come round or whatever when there is a deadline to get the app in production. We had the problem with want to use a queue (ActiveMQ) but were told that tech support were not going to support it if we did that so we had to implement a simple queue.

      “With a bloated language like Java you only artificially lower the barrier of entry, though, and the result is absolutely horrible software.”

      I have marked take home and in office java code, and most developers do crap despite the number of years they are working. Java does allow people to bloat, rely on frameworks and write some realy confusing code. How a lot of developers it is really hard to write simple code that works. Yes java can make this hard to do at times, but it can be done.

      ” If your work is exploratory in nature, writing a bunch of tests in advance is normally just a waste o time as you’ll end up modifying your tests as you’re writing your code.”

      This is especially true for anything front end.

      “I fully disagree with your claim that a different paradigm shouldn’t be a problem for a developer. ”

      Well if you are good developer, and can learn this stuff and practise this, then it should not be problem. Not all developers are bad or inflexible. I agree there are a lot out there, and they get work cause there are jobs and they need people and they get some one with the brains to give them the solution which they implement (ie code monkey).

      Yes it is hard to find the good from the bad, especially when we look for them. I have rejected probably 90% of devs for a role, either after a take home test or in house test.

      ” If you want security, it’s better to be very hard to replace. That won’t work with Java at all”

      Big Businesses with old apps takes time to replace their software, either rewrite or splitting it up into small services. Even then, they will still stick with a language if they believe there is big market place so they get people in.

      With the development of more microservices and langauges being easier to change for different services, this is not too much of a problem.

      Being niche or being invalauble due to your expertise does help with job secruity.

      But going for smaller niche jobs, may mean being stuck in a company with limited opportunities to move, this could be a problem if the company collapses.

      ” They are mentally so inflexible that they abuse the language they are using to fit the one language and paradigm they know.”

      I agree people writing imperative style in a functional language is not great. Even with java, when you can write something in a functional style but people are used to writing in am imperative style is not great.

    18. @cani
      Actor model is slightly different from vert.x reactive programming but they mix quite well. Vertx use and event bus as medium of exchange of data between Verticle, in actor model every actor has a queue of message. I am building a push notification server at the moment and the actor model model fit the requirements quite nicely. In 2020 manage threads in the application is overkill, it is like writing a web server in assembly, maybe it made sense in 1993 not in 2020.
      OOP went wrong exacly in multithreaded application, encapsulation works in single-threaded OOP (but in that case it is just syntactic sugar, method(a, params) -> a.method(params) not big change, that is actually what C++ does, I guess the same in Java) but breaks when more threads access the method, so you lock the section but that kill the performance for current multicore multilayer cache cpu architecture. And this is only with single machine, distribuited lock is even worse. If we think that every CPU core has a cache (multiple layer actually), every core can be thought as a computer where the main memory is the network layer. In this architecture there isn’t shared data between core unless explicitly defined with all the issue of visibility problem you have in Java thread. With the Actor model all this issues disappeared, yes Akka is for java too even if it was more used in Scala it seems.

    19. @Aaron
      I am not quite sure you need to be smart for programming, for sure not 100sIQ range but probably 110-120 range is enough. Most people are not interested to the craft of programming, to read the best practice, refactor the code, improve and try to craft the best possible solution. The mindset is make it works with some trial and error, go to next task. A very smart person can abstract the key point of the solution and go as deep as needed to details multiple time during the design process in fast way. I am sure with some dedication a lot of people can do better that the current state of software, it is not only a IQ issue I think.
      For sure imperative paradigm allow to create step by step solution, try and error until it works that functional paradigm disallow. I am quite sure recursion is what distinguish a good developer from a shitty one, and FP is based on recursion more then imperative paradigm.

    20. Recursion is often just implicit as it’s hidden in standard higher-order functions like map and filter. You don’t write explicit recursions that often in production code written in a functional language, which may be surprising to anyone who has taken a course in FP at university. Still, someone who hasn’t grasped recursion is not going to handle this well.

      I think the best indicator for functional programming ability is mathematical aptitude. I think it’s also rather safe to assume that someone with a decent background in mathematics will not only pick up a functional programming language very easily, they’ll also end up better programmers in any paradigm due to their ability to deal with abstractions. Personally, I’d value a solid mathematical education far higher than years of experience in a particular language, which is a bullshit metric.

    21. I can really recommend this book:
      “Domain Modeling Made Functional” by Scott Wlaschin

      It takes the good parts of DDD, but without the OOP crap, and combines it with functional programming concepts (pure functions, immutability, and so on)

      my style was influenced quite a lot by this book. works quite nice especially for stateless backend stuff.

    22. The problem of such approaches is that you don’t get any guarantees. Sure, you can tell yourself that you’re now writing Java code with best-practices in mind that were inspired by functional programming, but what do you think will happen when there is a deadline looming and you have to push a feature out? More likely than not, you’ll have someone taking a shortcut. You’ll tell each other that you’ll do this properly when you have the time but it will never be fixed. That’s how rot in large projects happens. A very similar example is using type signatures in dynamic languages. At one point, someone will want to do something quickly and they hack together an important function that returns values of different types and this one decision then leads to metastasis of horrible code. Yet, the more of it you have, the harder it will be to get rid of it. You’re better off with a programming language that doesn’t need external and poorly reinforced constraints like design patterns but instead doesn’t allow you to easily get away with shoddy solutions.

      EDIT: The book you mentioned uses F#. As long as you’re using F# or a similar language, you’ll probably be fine, but I would not be surprised if this book is also read by people working in mainstream languages like Java, PHP, or Python.

    23. Wow, this was really rich discussions and I’ve learnt a lot.

      I agree with you that OOP is over-hyped and lead to low-quality software. I hope in my next job I will be using FP and not OOP. Or maybe I will be able to convince my next teammates to start using Scala.

      The author of Erlang summarized OOP very nicely:
      http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/OO_programming/why_oo_sucks

      I am already purchasing this book about DDD in FP that you’ve recommended.

      Can you recommend other books about high-level design/architectural patterns?

      I fail this kind of questions on interviews every time. Partly because of my lack of experience and partly because it’s kind of open-ended questions and I prefer questions for which I can provide precise answers.

    24. @Michal

      Yes oop(java/c# OOP) is probably not the best, but it is used in many systems. Systems that are integral to many organisations. More importantly they work. Unless there is a fatal secruity problem or some fatal flow they will not get replaced, just maintaed. similar to the COBOL systems powering a lot of banking systems. But unlike these cobol systems which were around 30/40/50 years ago there were not that many, unlike the abundance of java systems around now. There will always be jobs in java, and demand and knowledge of this is always useful even if it is to see the downsides of this paradigm

      @Sleazy

      “You’re better off with a programming language that doesn’t need external and poorly reinforced constraints like design patterns but instead doesn’t allow you to easily get away with shoddy solutions.”

      Unfortunately, in a lot of companies (Generally non tech), the language is set (or a set of languages can be used). So you just have to make do with what you have. Of course you can argue, but nothing gets done, you can threaten but does not matter, and you can leave for some where better.

      Yes containers allow you to use different languages, but businesses dont want to have one team to have lots of languages all other the place and having to hire lots of different specialists (due to being dependent on them).

      @DrDivago

      Yes IQ is so important to this field, I have seen many dev’s hired at our company,esp women who do not have the capacity to learn or improve in this field despite all the help they get or the amount of effort they put in. They become a burden and our moved to different teams or departments (esp non technical ones)

      Unfortunately, so many people do online classes, follow tutorials, copy open source projcets, get certifications and have a github portfolio, and claim they are programmers. Yet when they get to a professional job they find it hard as everything require thinking or doing some thing different or completely new everyday.

      The video is good and the links too.

    25. Your view on corporate work is a tad negative. You can also try to convince your superiors to let you use a different language. This works especially well when you do some exploratory work. Obviously, you need a bit of a track record to pull this off, but it can be done. If your job consists of maintenance work, this has about a 0% chance of success. On the other hand, if you do any “greenfield” work, this is a good strategy. In fact, in some companies it’s even a mantra (“build one to throw it away”). Once I wrote a small prototype in Haskell, which allowed me to define very clear abstractions. I then used the types and function signatures to translate my solution into a different language. This was a lot faster than writing code in the target language right away. Of course, you need to have a somewhat enlightened manager to get away with that as there are too many incredibly narrow-minded people in this industry. They don’t grasp that it’s not a waste of time and money to spend x weeks on a prototype you throw away if it cuts your development time in half afterwards and you save a large multiple of x.

    1. That guy is a (legitimate) scammer. His Red Pill huckstering is just his latest attempt at making money.

    2. LMAO! Thanks for the laugh. I looked over his channel and he claims to be banging hot, young women. I’m sure he gets laid as much as guys like Krauser PUA and Tom Torero do. In other words, he doesn’t 😛

      My main main beef with these “red pill dudes” is they spend their entire day circle jerking each other about who’s the biggest and baddest “online alpha male” of all. While there’s some mild truth to some of what they stuff they say, it’s really bad advice for guys who actually want to meet and need to do a lot of work. Rather than losing weight/gaining muscle, improving their grooming, updating their wardrobe and having some cool hobbies/passions, guys blame women and develop bizarre theories. Many “red pillers” blame women for being so picky today and not wanting to fuck them.

      While I do think a lot of women act poorly these days and have higher standards than ever, that’s just the times we live in. You have to “step up your game” to get on the same playing field. Taking advice from a dweeb like him will do nothing for guys
      serious about picking up! Women don’t care about a guy’s red pill/alpha male status online!

    3. “Waman these days” “Hypergamy wa wa” – No, the problem is that you think you are a winner when in reality you are a loser. Thank god that those guys are to dumb to unterstand that they rather should stay anonymous and not show their faces on the Internet.

      Since seeing the faces of those guys I’m finally completely out. Without an remorse

  3. Why didn’t you study Mathematics instead of Economics? They don’t teach Math at London School of Economics?

  4. Looks like they’re going to try and drag out these riots/protests some more:

    https://youtu.be/hnRuWcgflaE

    Someone commented that the news cherry picked the shooting section only. Two cops and a taser were unable to bring down and average built black man. Smh.

    1. What kind of first name is “Rayshard”?

      This is a pretty discomforting video. So, the cops shot him in the back. He fell down, and then they shout, “put your hands behind your back”. That’s similar to cops shouting “stop resisting!” as they beat up a suspect. I think the issue here is that the cops simply panicked, and understandably so. Thus, they resorted to shooting. This is related to the phenomenon that female cops use lethal force much more often than male cops, i.e. they need to because they otherwise can’t control a suspect. It would probably help if you only sent out policemen who could lift a certain amount of weight to make sure they are physically able to do their job.

    2. With all that footage, someone could probably easily produce a dystopian movie. No matter how outlandish the actions of those activists are, you have to remember that our hostile elites let all of this happen. All of this could be over in half an hour if they wanted to. With water cannons and teargas you can disperse protesters very easily.

    3. The police officer involved in the shooting has been slapped with 11 charges including felony murder. His partner is so fearful for his life and career that he is willing to testify against him. No bond. Up to life in prison or even a death sentence (we’ll let the mob decide). To be fair, as sad as an attempt that they made to arrest the man, once he had the taser he could have easily incapacitated either officer and taken their firearm from them. Normally this would probably be a justified use of deadly force and they would have done so even if the guy was Chinese or Russian. It certainly doesn’t look motivated by race to me, especially in the wake of the Floyd ‘protests’, no cop in his right mind would have made that call unless they thought they were in the clear for doing so imo. But we’ll see what happens in court, I guess.

      https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jun/17/rayshard-brooks-charges-atlanta-police-officer-garrett-rolfe

      It might seem like a good idea to own a weapon to protect yourself, however, I have a feeling that things will get to the point where some asshole is allowed to enter your home and rape your wife/rob you. If you shoot the perpetrator in your own home in the name of self-defense, you’ll be on trial for excessive force and murder with an underlying race related motivation. So that even if you do get off, your life is essentially over.

    4. Wow. I ran it through a translator. It’s this kind of stuff that makes you want to beat your head against a wall.

    5. #BlueFlu is trending now as probably the first legitimate pushback in the recent spark of culture wars:

      https://www.wrbl.com/news/blue-flu-a-number-of-atlanta-police-officers-walk-out-in-protest/

      Police officers in Atlanta, in the wake of the recent charges placed on their fellow officer, have walked out on the job and are refusing to take calls. And reasonably so. Who wants to risk being sentenced to life in prison and/or demonized by the media? I hope the city burns, and I hope we see more pushback like this.

  5. Have you guys ever met a girl who was smoking hot and DTF but you couldn’t fuck her because she was so incredibly stupid? I mean she was so dumb that it turned you off, even for one night.

    1. Of course. It helps to not talk a lot to them, though. If she’s DTF, then just bang her as soon as possible. (Are you by any chance referring to that woman at the massage parlor?)

    2. No sir, not yet. But it has crossed my mind. The salons open up in Cali this Friday I believe. I will go there when they open up. This stupid lock down has lasted forever.

  6. I was just watching some footage on YouTube from the 1960-early 1970s. I watched Ronald Reagan as governor of California. Hard Hats in New York kicking the shit out of hippies. Segregationist George Wallace running for president.

    One thing I picked up was how similar our problems today are to those of that era. All one needs to do is talk shit on Leftist. People fucking love it. Wallace wanted hippie protesters at his rallies simply because of how much people enjoyed him eviscerating them. Like Archie Bunker, and Eric Cartman. In public we put on a persona that supports the media narrative. Privately we agree wholeheartedly with the fuddy duddy’s. It largely explains Trump’s appeal.

  7. Look at that:
    https://twitter.com/comparethemedia/status/1271529015095046146
    “18.6% of Minneapolis’ total real estate listings have popped up for sale in just the last 7 days”

    This is Joe Public’s response to the Black riots (did I capitalize this correctly or is this only done in particular circumstances?). I have a hunch that there won’t be many buyers for all that property. I could also imagine that a few people will rub their hands and buy property pennies on the dollar, expecting a quick recovery. What I expect, though, is that everybody who can will abandon the city. Then you’ll end up with Detroit or a reenactment of Escape From New York, but the B-tier version of it.

    1. Very interesting. I’m curious to see what the real estate market looks like in Seattle, Atlanta etc. around this time next year.

  8. Guys, I’d like to pick up on the China vs USA thing. One thing that Aaron mentioned that completely settles this thing is this: the Chinese appreciation of history. They know they were the best. With patience they will be the best again. Americans view the past negatively. “That’s so yesterday!”

    On that note, Americans (if they know history at all) only know that “6 million” of a foreign tribe were killed in the 1940s. In China the defining moment in their history is when 22 million of their OWN PEOPLE perished during the same conflict. They probably couldn’t care less about the “6 million.” Do you think they would give a fuck how many Tibetans were slaughtered by the Japanese?? They have a strong tendency toward nationalism. Their appreciation of their past, heritage, and nationalism will eventually overwhelm the West.

    1. There has been a push to promote Western “values” in Asia, i.e. some mixture of “democracy”, homosexuality, gender-mania, destruction of the family unit, creation of the welfare state, and donating billions of dollars every year to Israel for no reason at all. That’s not going too well. The Hong Kong riots were a Hail Mary of the US State Department. The average Chinese finds it ludicrous that you’d want to destroy your own country. Thus, they see the self-inflicted problems of the West and laugh. The term “baizuo” is really used. It’s not some kind of Russian hoax.

  9. NSFW (a funny porn compilation)

    https://www.xnxx.com/video-c2sdt3e/fail_compilation

    Skip to 10:20* to marvel at my new role model and mentor: Regan Senter a.k.a. the king of sneaky cream pies. What a man. What a stud. What a legend!

    I found an excerpt of a documentary about him on reddit: apparently he did 100s of “castings” with decent to hot looking chicks (most young). (Notice the absence of (nasty) tattoos at most of the aspiring “models”.) I cannot imagine that he made a living with his “agency”, but I think at the very least this old, fat, clumsy, unhung bloke accomplished to have sex with many (young) hot chicks for free. Maybe he even made an extra buck with this. So cudos to him! I am serious! (I guess he read Aarons articles “How to Fuck Escorts for Less Money (for Real)” and “Elaborations on Your First Porn Business” (20 years before they were written) and really took them to heart.)

    For the most part I am only able to find little snippets of his castings (most of them only 2 mins long). As if he had Asperger’s it is always the same procedure. His outros only differ in regard to the name of the respective modle. (By the way, does anyone by chance know the name of the stone-faced lass at 12:55?)

    (*Please be sure to close the video no later than at 14:55 when the section about him finishes and the next one starts as you might chunder on your keyboard – consider yourselves warned!)

  10. I pimped up the pics on my Tinder account with FaceApp today via its „handsome“ feature. Finally, I am getting a few matches. (I guess coz of muh personality and shiet.)

    I think the effect of the feature is rather staggering. Aaron rated my face a 7.5 (I believe) during a consultation about 18 months ago, but with the help of the app it looks more like a 8.5 or 9 now, I would say. So quite the shift. But I think, should I get a date this way I will go trough with it and try my best to score. (I might however wet my pants on my way to meet her/them, LOL.) In swiping mode my trickery should evade their attention, but once the girls take a closer look at my pics, they should see something’s up as the manipulation looks rather obvious – at least in my opinion. So maybe I will not even get to date them. In the longterm I probably should go for less drastic, more subtil ways of image editing. However, I think at least 20-30% of the profiles I come across feature the same or similar shenanigans.

    I created a female cat fish account on Tinder last week and was blown away by my competition: a lot of chads and a lot of balling chads living the high live. (More precisely, a lot of Kurt Donnerschwanz and Chalid Desertsaber.)

    1. I’ve never used enhancements for online photos before, but my guess is that your’s are exaggerated the same as everybody else. You only notice because it’s you. Think about how many times you looked in the mirror. Nobody on this planet has seen you that many times, and different lighting, angles, etc. I would go as far as saying that most people are better looking than they think they are. Hell, for that reason alone, I might even break down and use the handsome app myself.

    2. @GoodLookingAndSleazy: Thanks for the feedback, man! I never thought about it that way, but it makes perfekt sense, I guess.

      I assume you got decent results so far via onlne dating (Tinder etc.), i.e. with unenhanced pics?

    3. It seems you’ve read my book on Online Dating! Don’t overdo it, though, because she should be able to recognize you in real life. I would assume that a large percentage of the profile pictures of women were edited. If you then consider the subset of women who use makeup (for the geeks: this should be an improper subset because it seems plausible that 100% of women who use online dating use makeup), you should end up at 100 % whose pictures are not genuine.

    4. You’re welcome bro. I actually quit online dating years ago. I’m too set in my ways to enhance my photos. I mean I refused accutane and braces as a teenager. I refuse any help. All at the same time I’m vain. It’s like I want to look the way I was “meant to look” or some shit.

  11. I just was browsing “next door” at Assanova’s place and his latest blog entry resonated with me very much. Something for the incels/blackpillers to ponder:

    http://moneymademen.com/women-dont-really-have-options/

    “Men think that women only go for Chads because that’s what it would take for them to be responsive to men outside of the usual circumstances and avenues. The rules of the game change once a woman is familiar with you. When women think of their dating options, they are really only thinking in terms of men that they are connected with, whether closely or loosely. This could be a social circle, or this could be a guy that chats her up when she occasionally runs into him.”

    I 100% agree! Women are extremely autistic in this regard (the stubborn cunts (LOL)). This not hot news for long time readers of this blog of course, but I keep forgetting about this from time to time. It is easy for me to slip into the black pill mindset.

    Personally, I think as a hard core introvert (and someone high in neuroticism) the main factor for me being an incel until I started visiting massage parlors in my late twenties was my basically non-existent social circle. It is fairly sized but does literally not contain one single woman and has been static af for years now. (For this reason the first six weeks of the lockdown were rough and I still miss my favorite two parlors.) My only girlfriend so far I met at work and I am still kind of suffering from the fallout of the break-up (yeah, yeah, I know, I know: shit, eat etc.).

    As always, there is no use in bitching: adjust your life accordingly if you wanna date (or “date”) women or simply go for hookers. You could also explore dolls or just stick to masturbation/porn. (For the unlikely case you are bi, try to go full homo. Gee, I wish I had this option, lol!) That are your options pretty much as far as I see it.

    Oh, I almost forgot: “Going back to what I figured out, although I got rejected by a lot of women that I was connected to in one way or another, almost all of them came around and later dated, slept with, or openly hit on me. Usually, when you are connected to a woman, and run into her multiple times, rejection usually means “not right now” and not “never”. It’s almost like they need time to think about it, become a little more familiar with you, or wait on their current romantic interest to drop back.”

    If I recall correctly Alek Novy talked about this ad nauseam. I have also witnessed guys quite a bit less attractive than me hooking up with quite a decent number of cute chicks through this mechanism.

    1. I could be wrong, but I tend to think that if a woman is connected to you and wants to fuck but doesn’t, that a boyfriend/husband is usually what gets in the way (and not always). I remember hearing Scottie from Good Looking Loser saying, “Why would you want a girl to push you through all of these shit tests?” I agree with him, but I’m also a stubborn motherfucker, and don’t take rejection very well lol.

    2. “I agree with him, but I’m also a stubborn motherfucker, and don’t take rejection very well lol.” Sums my attitude up nicely. I also suck at holding tension and I am unpatient as fuck. Whenever I see a hot chick I would just like to approach her with somethinng like: “Hey. You caught my attention. I think you are very attrctive. Would you like to have sex with me (in the near future)?”

      I cannot stand chit-chat. I just hate it. It is so painful. I literally do not want to talk to her. I just want sex with her. That’s what I like about paysex so much. Saying hi and then bang bang boom – down to buisness, lol.

    3. Yep bro we are pretty similar. I can’t stand being idle. Your approach is definitely direct, but I’m actually even less wordy! I love the pros too. No games. No drama. Sure thing. There is something so pure about prostitution ?

      Recently I think Aaron and the guys discussed Scottie, the guy I quoted. This guy is nothing but direct and straight forward. He is a wrecking ball of energy. If I had half his balls my problems would be solved. Doesn’t talk much. Gets physical with women QUICK. Goes straight for the action. Doesn’t give a fuck if the girls not down. Keeps going, knowing he’s gonna get laid.

    4. “Your approach is definitely direct, but I’m actually even less wordy!” I mean: were I able to lock eyes with the gym thot of my choosing and then signal her to follow me to the shower stalls to suck me off I would definitely do it ?
      I REALLY just want sex from her. No need from my side to get verbal at any point at all. But this type of stuff is just not in the cards for me (only in dream or virtual worlds).

      Regarding the video: Wow! Doing this kind of stuff in a club: that’s one thing. But out on the streets? Nah, I would lack the balls for this. Partly, because I am afraid of committing social suicide, getting my ass kicked etc. Scotty’s energy/presence really is impressive. I think he is on the juice so maybe he just manages to channel his roid rage in a productive, non-violent way so to speak. (At least this might be part of it.)

      “Doesn’t give a fuck if the girls not down. Keeps going, knowing he’s gonna get laid.” I could not do this – partly because I over-sensitized myself to rejection via mindless cold approaching during my PUA days. (Never went overboard with it, luckily, but still.) Rejection stings af for me. I would need to be more stoic about it.

    5. Since I started with regular escort sessions (1-2 x per week) I have zero patience for the bullshit you have to go through the “normal” way.
      Just before the corona bullshit started, I was trying tinder again. I even managed to get 2 dates out of it, but the girls were average at best, so I had zero motivation to try to have sex with them.
      And one talked about her fucking horse. I was like “please kill me”, just excused myself after like 30 minutes and drove home.

      Oh and by the way, some escorts droped a lot of red/black pills lately.

      One, a very hot 25 year old told me “oh I normally just date models” (so much about “just have confidence bro!” lol)
      Then another one, even younger (estimate her to be 22), told me about her male model friend who gets women left and right from tinder.
      Once you have hot girls admitting to you in real life that looks are like 95% you really know it is the truth.

    6. @ Aaron, I haven’t met Scotty in person but Im a big fan of GLL. I’ve seen some footage of Scotty and the things Chris has said about him. I can really identify with him. Like what I would be like if I lowered my inhibitions.

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