Steve Yegge is a renowned software developer. He’s done this for thirty-odd years. Senior engineer at Amazon then Google, blogger on the art of programming. Yegge was highly regarded. Then he got h…
  • lproven@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    23 hours ago

    I read this yesterday with the most remarkable mix of emotions for a tech post: astonishment, revulsion, traces of hilarity, mounting disgust and disdain, shock, fear, dismay, pity, sadness.

    For those who don’t know the name… Yegge has been writing (very very long) blog posts about tech for about 20 years now. In his early days he wrote some of the most insightful stuff about Lisp I’ve seen anywhere. One of his similes is an all-time favourite tech quote of mine that I have quoted before:

    Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.

    Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: “the car that’s always in front of you.”

    Common Lisp is Howl’s Moving Castle.

    Source: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-interpreter-for-emacs.html

    Yes, this bloke wrote an Emacs addin that lets it run Javascript. That has implications: it’s important, it’s almost guaranteed to infuriate the Emacs purists, so he wouldn’t get much help, had to do it solo, and fast.

    He got all excited about moving to S.E. Asia somewhere a bit before COVID. From a mention in this piece, I guess he married a local woman. That might explain it.

    It didn’t pan out and he came back. He’s worked for a few of the FAANG type giants. Then he was going to revive his hobby videogame and make his millions from that.

    Now he drank the Koolaid and his brain’s run out from his ears. It’s a damned shame. I didn’t agree with him about many things but he was very smart and really could write – text, not code, but code too.

    There are a lot of highly opinionated people in tech. Few of them can write. Fewer of them can write short (it’s a real skill, hard to learn and hard to do) and few have the sheer patience and stamina to write long (which is the next best thing).

    Yegge wrote long, and it was worth it.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      15 hours ago

      One sad thing I’ve noticed due to vibe-coding is the amount of slop packages being spewed out for niche-but-hip languages like Common Lisp and Erlang. The lisp subreddit has a guy pulling up with a bunch of vibe-coded stuff, and somebody on Something Awful turned up with a CLI forums client that forwards through NNTP (???) written in Elixir that everyone thought was kinda neat for a second until they realized it was mostly slop.

      Hard to say it’s making these language ecosystems any more “alive” if it’s all stuff that has to be re-evaluated and probably replaced entirely. And it definitely seems like Yegge isn’t the only one using this stuff to make absolute fever-dream architectural decisions that wouldn’t even be a consideration if they had to write it all themselves.