Let me preface this by saying I love Handmade Hero and I have been watching Handmade Hero for about 7 years (I just looked up my receipt and i bought it on 21 March 2016 and yes there is 'but' coming).
But I always disliked the Handmade Community.
I have 3 main points that I just can not understand and I'm really interested in your opinion about them.
1) Firstly where does the whole premise that software somehow is worse now than it used to be come from?
Is software perfect today? Surely not I get grumpy about any one of the programs i use almost daily. But as someone who has used software since about 1987 I do not remember a time when it was better.
I waited 5 mins to for 'Defenders of the earth' to load from tape on my commodore c64. C&C: Red Alert frequently crashed on my machine and I had to install every other game from my drive just to play c&c: tiberian sun and it ran sooo bad.
Just starting Windows 95 took minutes and it frequently crashed. And over the years it never got much better or worse. I hated 'The witcher' because it had such long loading times.
But it wasn't only games, using any 3D authoring tools on consumer hardware was a pain.
And things objectively got better. I tried to find reliable times for windows 95 boot times and I could only find a few videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFpv7ok1Mk8 which seem to confirm that it took about a minute to boot windows 95.
I could find a lot of articles (tomshardware) for example that current windows boots in about 5 seconds. So that's about 12 times as fast.
Just watch this actual windows 95 advertisement (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLlWrt-zmTo). They probably wanted it to look really good and it really didn't. Everything was horrible and sluggish.
So i disagree that things have been universally better. That just seems like some nostalgia for a world that never existed. But we agree that things could be much better. Which leads me to point number
2) The need to blame someone. I fully understand that to make things better the handmade community tried to figure out how software got to where it is today. But why is there so much need to blame programmers that do not have the same ideals as you?
I partly understand this point much better now, thanks to your article.
I personally think that it is a naive view of our world to assume that if only all programmers would love their craft we would be in a better place.
Many communities have adopted this approach like some vegetarian/vegan groups, some environmental organization. It's always the same pattern, the system is not to blame but all people just need to not eat meat / recycle / write handmade software and all people who do not abide by the rules are automatically bad people or in the handmade case: bad programmers.
To me your approach seems like fighting capitalism itself, because the best products/programs don't always win or survive. There is a lot of factors that are in play to make a product viable and being 'good' is only one of them. And I think time has shown that it sadly is not even the most important one. You can read into any of the format wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war) to see that the best technology doesn't always come out on top.
I think if you really want to change the world going all in on your ideals or refusing to work is not a good approach, but i might be wrong and you might be right.
Having ideals is great, advertising your ideals is great and teaching them to others is great.
But thinking that you need to go to war over your ideals or that people that do not share them are your opponents(your words not mine) is in my opinion a dangerous and fruitless path to go down. You can build great things with people that share some of your ideals or none of them, if you don't isolate yourself from them.
And one way to isolate yourself is, which brings me to my last point,
3) Insulting everyone on the way. I have nothing against harsh critique. Be as harsh as you like about a product or a person. But critiques should be about facts not emotions. Use all your emotions to hold up your ideals, but make it about *your* ideals not other peoples ideals being wrong.
Just some examples from this article.
a) `The community failed to gatekeep against those who disagreed with its premises, and as such was subject to a deluge of average Internet programmers.` I'm pretty sure average Internet programmer is meant as an insult here or at least something people should strive to not be. Which in itself seems like a strange insult but apart from that your saying (if I'm not misunderstanding) everyone that disagrees with the handmade ideals must be an 'average Internet programmer'.
b) `the culturally dominant trend in the programming world, however, was to collect a paycheck and abdicate responsibility for low-quality software`. Where is this even coming from? I have worked in software a long time and I have a lot of friends who do. I know almost nobody who was in it just for the paycheck. Most people i meet have a love for the product they are making. But you just insulted all of them. Where is that coming from?
c) `several large software projects to which individuals have dedicated careers are valueless wastes of time and energy`. Firstly name one. Secondly how would the premise to make good software for the user make any software a valueless waste of time? It might not be a good piece of software yet or even going the wrong direction for you. But it probably has some value for someone or it wouldn't exist. And that is exactly my point you can defend your values and critique software without calling them valueless wastes.
I know very long comment. Sorry but i always wanted to know how certain rhetoric that made me dislike the handmade community started or if I'm maybe not getting some point. I also understand that in a fiery article like this some insults may fly to convey your love of programming and your dislike of people who do it 'just' for money. But do you inflammatory rhetoric like 'battlefield', 'Opponent', 'decay', and so on is really necessary or helpful?
And i get that one of the points of your article was that you should have gatekept more and defended the use of strong rhetoric. I just think that you maybe made less of a mistake then you think and that the line between vigorously defending your ideals and baseless insults can be very thin.
And I also don't think you should limit what you say just because someone might feel offended.
So I'm guessing whole point here is the same as yours. Venting our frustration that software is not what we want it to be and the handmade community is also not what we wanted it to be. Although we both probably disagree on how the community should be different.
At least we can probably both agree to the following.
Let's make great software. For everyone. For the love of computing. I wish you all the best. Keep up the good work.
Let me preface this by saying I love Handmade Hero and I have been watching Handmade Hero for about 7 years (I just looked up my receipt and i bought it on 21 March 2016 and yes there is 'but' coming).
But I always disliked the Handmade Community.
I have 3 main points that I just can not understand and I'm really interested in your opinion about them.
1) Firstly where does the whole premise that software somehow is worse now than it used to be come from?
Is software perfect today? Surely not I get grumpy about any one of the programs i use almost daily. But as someone who has used software since about 1987 I do not remember a time when it was better.
I waited 5 mins to for 'Defenders of the earth' to load from tape on my commodore c64. C&C: Red Alert frequently crashed on my machine and I had to install every other game from my drive just to play c&c: tiberian sun and it ran sooo bad.
Just starting Windows 95 took minutes and it frequently crashed. And over the years it never got much better or worse. I hated 'The witcher' because it had such long loading times.
But it wasn't only games, using any 3D authoring tools on consumer hardware was a pain.
And things objectively got better. I tried to find reliable times for windows 95 boot times and I could only find a few videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFpv7ok1Mk8 which seem to confirm that it took about a minute to boot windows 95.
I could find a lot of articles (tomshardware) for example that current windows boots in about 5 seconds. So that's about 12 times as fast.
Just watch this actual windows 95 advertisement (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLlWrt-zmTo). They probably wanted it to look really good and it really didn't. Everything was horrible and sluggish.
So i disagree that things have been universally better. That just seems like some nostalgia for a world that never existed. But we agree that things could be much better. Which leads me to point number
2) The need to blame someone. I fully understand that to make things better the handmade community tried to figure out how software got to where it is today. But why is there so much need to blame programmers that do not have the same ideals as you?
I partly understand this point much better now, thanks to your article.
I personally think that it is a naive view of our world to assume that if only all programmers would love their craft we would be in a better place.
Many communities have adopted this approach like some vegetarian/vegan groups, some environmental organization. It's always the same pattern, the system is not to blame but all people just need to not eat meat / recycle / write handmade software and all people who do not abide by the rules are automatically bad people or in the handmade case: bad programmers.
To me your approach seems like fighting capitalism itself, because the best products/programs don't always win or survive. There is a lot of factors that are in play to make a product viable and being 'good' is only one of them. And I think time has shown that it sadly is not even the most important one. You can read into any of the format wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war) to see that the best technology doesn't always come out on top.
I think if you really want to change the world going all in on your ideals or refusing to work is not a good approach, but i might be wrong and you might be right.
Having ideals is great, advertising your ideals is great and teaching them to others is great.
But thinking that you need to go to war over your ideals or that people that do not share them are your opponents(your words not mine) is in my opinion a dangerous and fruitless path to go down. You can build great things with people that share some of your ideals or none of them, if you don't isolate yourself from them.
And one way to isolate yourself is, which brings me to my last point,
3) Insulting everyone on the way. I have nothing against harsh critique. Be as harsh as you like about a product or a person. But critiques should be about facts not emotions. Use all your emotions to hold up your ideals, but make it about *your* ideals not other peoples ideals being wrong.
Just some examples from this article.
a) `The community failed to gatekeep against those who disagreed with its premises, and as such was subject to a deluge of average Internet programmers.` I'm pretty sure average Internet programmer is meant as an insult here or at least something people should strive to not be. Which in itself seems like a strange insult but apart from that your saying (if I'm not misunderstanding) everyone that disagrees with the handmade ideals must be an 'average Internet programmer'.
b) `the culturally dominant trend in the programming world, however, was to collect a paycheck and abdicate responsibility for low-quality software`. Where is this even coming from? I have worked in software a long time and I have a lot of friends who do. I know almost nobody who was in it just for the paycheck. Most people i meet have a love for the product they are making. But you just insulted all of them. Where is that coming from?
c) `several large software projects to which individuals have dedicated careers are valueless wastes of time and energy`. Firstly name one. Secondly how would the premise to make good software for the user make any software a valueless waste of time? It might not be a good piece of software yet or even going the wrong direction for you. But it probably has some value for someone or it wouldn't exist. And that is exactly my point you can defend your values and critique software without calling them valueless wastes.
I know very long comment. Sorry but i always wanted to know how certain rhetoric that made me dislike the handmade community started or if I'm maybe not getting some point. I also understand that in a fiery article like this some insults may fly to convey your love of programming and your dislike of people who do it 'just' for money. But do you inflammatory rhetoric like 'battlefield', 'Opponent', 'decay', and so on is really necessary or helpful?
And i get that one of the points of your article was that you should have gatekept more and defended the use of strong rhetoric. I just think that you maybe made less of a mistake then you think and that the line between vigorously defending your ideals and baseless insults can be very thin.
And I also don't think you should limit what you say just because someone might feel offended.
So I'm guessing whole point here is the same as yours. Venting our frustration that software is not what we want it to be and the handmade community is also not what we wanted it to be. Although we both probably disagree on how the community should be different.
At least we can probably both agree to the following.
Let's make great software. For everyone. For the love of computing. I wish you all the best. Keep up the good work.