Name: Connoisseur 2010-07-16 15:30
Got sent this in an e-mail, thought you guys might like it. From some objectivist's blog, I think.
At work today I discussed a new rule of thumb with the hiring manager, in an effort to stave off more fuckups like the guy we just had to fire. I provided her with a list of theory buzzwords and academic programming languages. If an applicant lists any of these on his resume, from now on she will not call him in for an interview. If he volunteers a mention of them during an interview, she will end it immediately.
For the naive among you: An academic programming language is by definition a language in which you cannot do real work. These languages are easy to identify because academics write papers about them. I think most people are unaware of the distinction, which is confusing because just four or five years ago it was glaringly obvious and nobody would take such a language seriously or ever try to use it to write an actual program. If some retard wanted to spend the rest of his life trying to write a working text editor in LISP, that was his business and all the people with homes and jobs could safely ignore him. Long story short? This is no longer true. Now the drooling lab rats have escaped from the lab. Now they're on my front lawn demanding to replace my Porsche with a cardboard box attached to a skateboard with organic barbed wire. Now they are literally in my actual business, wasting my time as well as theirs.
When a viral infection escapes from a lab, it's a disaster, a plague. It's the fucking armageddon. I think we should treat the theories of academia exactly the same way. God knows we've seen this happen in other fields-just look at the Gulf of Mexico. But at least that's a poison we can see with our eyes. Usually when academics poison industry with their impossible ideas, it goes completely unnoticed, and the world treats disasters as mysterious.
My industry is one of these. American programmers don't understand why nobody ever hires them. They complain about this on web pages like Reddit and Y Combinator, where they also discuss functional programming, monads, and web frameworks written in Ruby and Python. And nothing about this strikes them as ironic or hypocritical.
The good news (for me) is that programmers from other countries are actually serious about their work. All the Chinese and Indians we interview know that in the real world, we are worried about real computers that exist, with real hardware and real performance limitations.
Meanwhile, academic heavyweights like Mr. Don Stewart brag about the great things that they can do in Haskell, like write a display server called X Monad. Actually it's not a display server, it's a window decorator. Actually it's not written in Haskell, it's written in C, with a thousand lines of convoluted Haskell necessary to use the foreign function interface and call the C code that it's written in. Actually everything Mr. Stewart writes is like this. "Superior performance, safety, and ease of use?" So says Mr. Stewart, in the Haskell book that he's selling to all the people who think Haskell sounds like a good idea. Why yes, he's making money on this deal. Did he forget to mention that?
Overselling one's snake oil is hardly unique to Mr. Stewart. It's like the foundation of academia as a concept. The university itself is snake oil, and the whole community is a giant pyramid scheme for keeping afloat those who buy into it. I do mean "buy." The veil of learning and education is a front for the conspiracy of industrial sabotage, the vast plot to bring down all of society in order to "prove" that the bearded professors in their poorly ventilated hidey-holes were Right All Along. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy, by the way-a common ailment of mongoloids and schizophrenics.
At work today I discussed a new rule of thumb with the hiring manager, in an effort to stave off more fuckups like the guy we just had to fire. I provided her with a list of theory buzzwords and academic programming languages. If an applicant lists any of these on his resume, from now on she will not call him in for an interview. If he volunteers a mention of them during an interview, she will end it immediately.
For the naive among you: An academic programming language is by definition a language in which you cannot do real work. These languages are easy to identify because academics write papers about them. I think most people are unaware of the distinction, which is confusing because just four or five years ago it was glaringly obvious and nobody would take such a language seriously or ever try to use it to write an actual program. If some retard wanted to spend the rest of his life trying to write a working text editor in LISP, that was his business and all the people with homes and jobs could safely ignore him. Long story short? This is no longer true. Now the drooling lab rats have escaped from the lab. Now they're on my front lawn demanding to replace my Porsche with a cardboard box attached to a skateboard with organic barbed wire. Now they are literally in my actual business, wasting my time as well as theirs.
When a viral infection escapes from a lab, it's a disaster, a plague. It's the fucking armageddon. I think we should treat the theories of academia exactly the same way. God knows we've seen this happen in other fields-just look at the Gulf of Mexico. But at least that's a poison we can see with our eyes. Usually when academics poison industry with their impossible ideas, it goes completely unnoticed, and the world treats disasters as mysterious.
My industry is one of these. American programmers don't understand why nobody ever hires them. They complain about this on web pages like Reddit and Y Combinator, where they also discuss functional programming, monads, and web frameworks written in Ruby and Python. And nothing about this strikes them as ironic or hypocritical.
The good news (for me) is that programmers from other countries are actually serious about their work. All the Chinese and Indians we interview know that in the real world, we are worried about real computers that exist, with real hardware and real performance limitations.
Meanwhile, academic heavyweights like Mr. Don Stewart brag about the great things that they can do in Haskell, like write a display server called X Monad. Actually it's not a display server, it's a window decorator. Actually it's not written in Haskell, it's written in C, with a thousand lines of convoluted Haskell necessary to use the foreign function interface and call the C code that it's written in. Actually everything Mr. Stewart writes is like this. "Superior performance, safety, and ease of use?" So says Mr. Stewart, in the Haskell book that he's selling to all the people who think Haskell sounds like a good idea. Why yes, he's making money on this deal. Did he forget to mention that?
Overselling one's snake oil is hardly unique to Mr. Stewart. It's like the foundation of academia as a concept. The university itself is snake oil, and the whole community is a giant pyramid scheme for keeping afloat those who buy into it. I do mean "buy." The veil of learning and education is a front for the conspiracy of industrial sabotage, the vast plot to bring down all of society in order to "prove" that the bearded professors in their poorly ventilated hidey-holes were Right All Along. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy, by the way-a common ailment of mongoloids and schizophrenics.