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simoncion • yesterday at 1:58 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

> I don't think suggesting that people are stupid is a very good argument.

I've worked with a lot of people. Many of them are that stupid. Suggesting that these stupid people do not exist, that -if they did exist- none of them are professional programmers, and -even if they were programmers- they do not have the means to voice support for something that they're smitten with is not a good argument.

I'll also vaguely gesture at the various studies that find that the majority of conversation -by post volume- on Internet Forums is done by a small number of people. Never doubt the ability for a few loud folks [0] with lots of time on their hands to dominate a conversation. This goes like 10,000x when there's a huge amount of money sloshing around in said industry and said industry really needs to maintain a positive public reputation.

[0] ...and -sometimes- their sockpuppets...


Replies

orangedog • yesterday at 2:02 PM

I didn't say that dumb people don't exist, I think positing that the reason people like these tools is because actually they're stupid isn't very compelling.

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Pannoniae • yesterday at 2:04 PM

As a less emotionally charged example (people get upset with being called stupid, justifiably) - the average size of an array or a list is less than 4.

With that many elements you'd be better off storing the elements as a tuple or a struct, but people often reach for a generic array container regardless.