Having read the article and somewhat followed the SK troubles, the only sensible conclusion I can draw is that the culture itself has become poor and unable to prosper, and is on a downward trajectory. A small % of people will obviously succeed but this doesn’t really make a culture. You having children today doesn’t guarantee the circumstances for your children, no matter how much of a financial or otherwise buffer you put in place - because your neighbours are in the same situation and nobody wants to take action to divert from the current course. This is another society that’s on track for extinction.
You just can’t play along and hope for the best. It doesn’t work that way and it never did. Forcing your kids to stay up until 4 am to study while you get yourself into debt is not a recipe for success no matter what the rest of the country is doing. It’s just terrible from a societal perspective.
We need to have a kind of a footnote in the pedagogy of software engineering, and engineering in general that states to avoid advice (“wisdom”, lol) expounded by blowhards. You can identify it usually by the title - it’ll have a Grand Style that betrays arrogance.
Lots of people from GoF onwards think they qualify to preach bullshit ultimatums, thinking they have it all figured out. I don’t think any of them have any fucking clue what should actually be considered harmful, what should be the two/three “hardest things in computer science”, and other nonsensical bullshit they write. With apologies to Dijkstra who I do find to have been one of the shining lights of computer science and engineering but is often misquoted/out-contexted for that considered harmful thing. His letters do betray a higher plane of wisdom.
The more recent “what programmers need to know about {x}” as if the author has any clue is just the continuation of “I’ve learned this last week/in my last project and it’s the most important thing,” instead of the trivia that it really is, or shit that’s abstracted for us nowadays and only serves to make the author feel superior. Just fuck off with all of that nonsense.
Coincidentally, I’m going to go and read the Hamming book as it’s got tangible value having been written by someone who has done something worthwhile in their career.
Aye current generation missed the golden years of this stuff, but I’m glad the musicians of this genre are for the most part all still alive and not dead from ODing or worse.
As an Ae fan I second this, and not in a snobbish way. I used to find Gantz Graf slightly jarring now it’s warm and fuzzy and melodic in many ways but man it took years of listening to them, album by album, to develop that ear. Still, I think Tri Repetae, Oversteps are some of their fuzziest works, and then of course Incunabula and Amber for easy listening.