> It's not that philosophy is dumb. It's just that it's useless.
If I take a moment and think through that statement, I highly doubt you even believe this. And if it is sincere, then it just reinforces the point of the person that you were replying to.
Do you think logic is useless? What about ethics and politics? What counts as science? What counts as knowledge? These are all philosophical inquiries.
Even your statement that it's "useless" is a philosophical judgement. What makes something "useful" and not a waste of time? I guess you can make the argument that certain fields within philosophy are useless, but at this point, you're already doing philosophy again.
You can try and ignore philosophy, but you're not going to avoid doing it. At worse, you'll just be doing it poorly.
When working with a larger code base, there will always be parts that you don't remember writing and you'll inevitably have to read the code to understand it. That's just part of the job/task, regardless of the style it's written in.
My post was mainly in regards to the recommendation of having someone just pick up a primary source and just start reading it. But I agree that, if you're taking a class and you have someone who can go through the text with you, then that's the best option instead of trying to go it alone. But that's different from just sending someone straight to the primary source alone.
And of course there are many interpretations of Nietzsche and there's reasonable disagreement on what he said. You're right that a secondary source or taking a class doesn't "save you from bad readings" of him, but it's still better than trying to go it alone.
There are many flat out wrong interpretations of him, and someone like a professor or a secondary source can definitely help avoid common misunderstandings and pitfalls when trying to read him.
It's an unpopular opinion depending on what you're recommending.
Telling someone "read the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle" will lead someone to just pick up any copy of the Nicomachean Ethics. There are a lot of translations of the Nicomachean Ethics and they are not all equal. They range from very good translations, to idiosyncratic readings of the text, to flat out bad translations.
Beyond poor translations, the ancients that you've recommended are good to start with and the recommendation to read the primary sources of them is just fine. Those texts are easy to digest without having a formal background in philosophy.
But for other philosophers (e.g. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hegel), telling someone to just "pick up one of their primary texts" is a disaster. It will either (a.) be complete gibberish to the reader without any context and they may just give up, or worse, (b.) they think they'll understand something without the proper context and spew nonsense in regards to that philosopher (this is why there are so many bad readings of Nietzsche).
So depending on what you're recommending, primary sources can be good, but in my experience, primary sources aren't good most of the time. Moreover, if someone is interested in a specific field like the OP is, then having a good secondary source can be extremely helpful to give someone an overview and proper understanding of the topic.
> Our next major challenge: We are dealing with 21 million lines of code.
I think I just fail to understand the true complexity of a browser, but how is Firefox 21 million lines of code? How can a browser be 21 million lines of code? That just seems so large for what a browser does.
It's true, but since vim is a bit old, copy/pasting can be a bit awkward due to having an internal clipboard with the buffer and not using the system's clipboard.
I wouldn't put that in a beginner tutorial (at least the system clipboard copying/pasting).
If I take a moment and think through that statement, I highly doubt you even believe this. And if it is sincere, then it just reinforces the point of the person that you were replying to.
Do you think logic is useless? What about ethics and politics? What counts as science? What counts as knowledge? These are all philosophical inquiries.
Even your statement that it's "useless" is a philosophical judgement. What makes something "useful" and not a waste of time? I guess you can make the argument that certain fields within philosophy are useless, but at this point, you're already doing philosophy again.
You can try and ignore philosophy, but you're not going to avoid doing it. At worse, you'll just be doing it poorly.