<story><title>The Importance of Humility in Software Development (2020)</title><url>http://humbletoolsmith.com/2020/08/10/the-importance-of-humility-in-software-development/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Flex247A</author><text>I started attending college a year ago. At that time, I didn&amp;#x27;t know much about programming: just a bit of C and some Python - enough to make first year college projects. After I started frequenting HN, I came across a lot of comments by developers on programming languages, toolchains, libraries, etc. Even though I didn&amp;#x27;t understand their arguments, I still believed what they said, because I thought they were experienced, so they must be right. Even though I hadn&amp;#x27;t 
used the tools personally, I started developing premature opinions on them: Java is verbose, so it must be avoided, PHP is inelegant etc. These opinions also gave a feeling of security: because I thought that I had chosen the right language for programming (Rust!), the right operating system, the right text editor (vim), and the right window manager (i3). This made me arrogant, because I saw myself as above my classmates, who were still using &amp;#x27;inferior&amp;#x27; tools and still struggling to grasp the concept of command line arguments. Over time, I realised that I was just basing my beliefs on HN comments, and it is not healthy in the long run. This article helped me a lot towards realising that. Thank you for posting this article :)&lt;p&gt;Edit: grammar</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>goto11</author><text>Lots of programming wars is just tribalism. Java is disliked on HN because it represent &amp;quot;enterprise&amp;quot; - big long-lived organizations which maintain a codebase for decades and therefore conservative. A different tribe than the startup tribe HN represent. Java is not in particular more verbose than say C or Rust for solving the same task, it is just a random slight on the language of a different tribe.&lt;p&gt;HN is a great community, but it has a very narrow perspective on the world.&lt;p&gt;As a beginner it is fine to chose to master one language first, but in the long run you should not &amp;quot;choose a language&amp;quot;, but rater learn to learn any language, and understand they all have their strength and weaknesses.&lt;p&gt;But there are so many choices of tools and technology in this industry and it is impossible to learn it all. Tribalism makes the world simpler because it narrows your perspective.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Importance of Humility in Software Development (2020)</title><url>http://humbletoolsmith.com/2020/08/10/the-importance-of-humility-in-software-development/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Flex247A</author><text>I started attending college a year ago. At that time, I didn&amp;#x27;t know much about programming: just a bit of C and some Python - enough to make first year college projects. After I started frequenting HN, I came across a lot of comments by developers on programming languages, toolchains, libraries, etc. Even though I didn&amp;#x27;t understand their arguments, I still believed what they said, because I thought they were experienced, so they must be right. Even though I hadn&amp;#x27;t 
used the tools personally, I started developing premature opinions on them: Java is verbose, so it must be avoided, PHP is inelegant etc. These opinions also gave a feeling of security: because I thought that I had chosen the right language for programming (Rust!), the right operating system, the right text editor (vim), and the right window manager (i3). This made me arrogant, because I saw myself as above my classmates, who were still using &amp;#x27;inferior&amp;#x27; tools and still struggling to grasp the concept of command line arguments. Over time, I realised that I was just basing my beliefs on HN comments, and it is not healthy in the long run. This article helped me a lot towards realising that. Thank you for posting this article :)&lt;p&gt;Edit: grammar</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SilverRed</author><text>To be fair though, there are better and worse tools. There are legitimate reasons to say that PHP should be avoided and that Rust is a good choice. It&amp;#x27;s just important to understand how much weight these opinions have and understand why they apply.&lt;p&gt;If you are building a bulk file rename tool, it doesn&amp;#x27;t matter how you do it as long as it works. If you are handling untrusted data from remote sources, then you may want to consider if C is a good idea.</text></comment>