思考与写作thorstenball.com
你怎么能不对编程心怀浪漫？
How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
2021 — 2022，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
Thorsten Ball 的这篇随笔以抒情的笔调回顾编程中的浪漫时刻：从早期黑客文化、个人与机器的对话，到写出几行文字就能凭空创造出“会动的东西”的魔力。文章追问：面对琐碎的日常工程工作，我们为何仍应对编程怀有浪漫之情。
为什么经久不衰：它提醒被日常琐事磨得疲惫的程序员重新看见这门手艺的魔力，这种追问在每一代开发者中都能引起共鸣。
HN 评论精选
能对编程浪漫的人是中了时代彩票的少数派，不应以此苛求所有人
我对编程怀有深深的浪漫之情，视其为自我实现。但字面地回答这个问题：我并不能代表整个行业，这是好事。当一个人有多种体面的谋生选择时，很容易对职业产生浪漫感——你有幸选了最贴近自我实现的那一个。但并非人人如此，对许多人来说编程只是养家糊口风险最低的方式。我们这些既浪漫又恰逢其时赚到钱的人，其实是中了彩票的少数派。这不是坏事。
picks_at_nits查看英文原文
I am deeply, deeply romantic about programming. I consider it an act of self-actualization. But answering the question literally, I am not representative of everyone in the industry, and that's a good thing. It's easy to feel romantic about your vocation when you have a number of reasonable options for achieving modest financial security, and you thus had the privilege of choosing the one that most closely matched your idea of self-actualization and self-identification. Not everyone in this economy has the same set of choices. For many, programming is the lowest-risk way to put a roof over their head and feed their family. We can make up little myths about how we romantics are obviously more passionate, work harder because it's our dream, are more deeply engaged, and so on. But in the end, I think we'll find as we look around that those of us who feel romantic about something that is also an excellent way to make money at this particular place in time and space have won a lottery of sorts, and are definitely in the minority. That's not a bad thing.
用 Brooks 的名言概括编程的诗意：凭想象造物，且造物真实运行
引用 Fred Brooks《人月神话》：'程序员如同诗人，几乎纯粹在思想材料上工作，凭想象力在空中筑城堡……但程序不同于诗，它是真实运行的，能产生可见的输出。神话与传说中的魔法在我们时代成真了。'
andrewflnr查看英文原文
While I don't disagree with the article, this quote better sums up how I feel about programming. > The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination... Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself... The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. -Fred Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month In deference to the counterpoints in this thread, a lot of the "poetry" we actually encounter seems to have been written by Vogons.
浪漫与琐碎现实并存，但换个视角看工作能帮你撑过幻灭的日子
我理解作者的意思：写下一堆文字就能创造出'某样东西'，确实很棒，就像木匠从头到尾盖房子、机械师在车库里造超跑的浪漫。但现实是木匠在百人施工队里盖千篇一律的联排屋，程序员在团队里调试银行依赖的服务器代码。不过偶尔停下来用浪漫的眼光看待工作还是有帮助的——我可以是'给富人做台面的数控编程员'，也可以是'用延续人类最古老传统的技艺，把山变成高档家具的人'。
grawprog查看英文原文
Seeing as i'm not as jaded yet as many of the other commenters here towards programming, maybe I can give my views. I understand what the author's getting at pretty simply, it's pretty awesome to write some words...lots and lots of words...and you create 'something'. It's sort of the same romance that say would surround something like A carpenter that builds homes from start to finish Or a mechanic that builds super cars in their garage I think it's that same thing The lone programmer hacking away building something awesome Unfortunately, like the 'romance' of most things, the reality is That carpenter's working on a crew of 100 people building yet another cooking cutter townhouse That mechanic works a day job at a shop and spends more time paying bills and dealing with customers And...that programmer They're part of a team debugging some server code somewhere that a bank or accounting firm relies on or something Sometimes though, I find it helps just to stop and think of things romantically from time to time, even if you're disillusioned. By the time I left my prior job, I was kind of fed up with it. But even then there was two ways I could look at it. I could be 'A CNC programmer in a granite shop making countertops and fireplaces for rich people' Or 'I turned mountains into high end furniture using large machines in a trade that stretches back to the farthest history of humanity.' Looking at it the second way helped on those days you just really didn't want to be there.
浪漫消磨于他人糟糕的代码和糟糕的文档，好的平台才让人重拾热爱
因为总得跟别人的代码打交道，而其中很多不可靠、有 bug、文档糟糕。我讨厌猜 API 参数，讨厌调试同事从 GitHub 装来的垃圾，讨厌刚学熟就被淘汰的软件，讨厌修 CI 和部署。我爱给 8086 或 AVR 写裸机代码，因为那些平台文档完善、有正式标准，比如 C 和 shell 脚本。
blueflow查看英文原文
Because you gotta work with other people's code at some point or another. And much of it is unreliable, buggy and/or badly documented. I hate guessing parameters for a API call, i hate debugging the garbage that my coworker installed from Github, i hate learning into some software and having it obsoleted within two years and i hate fixing the CI/deployments. I love writing bare-metal code for the 8086 or AVR, because these platforms and their peripheral chips are well documented. I love platforms with formal standards and good documentation like C or shell script. But this isn't always useful these days.
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