Posted by jxmorris12 3 days ago
And while I'm talking about artistic quality on HN, I have to take some obligatory potshots at the website in question. When I have to use Safari's reader mode to see what you wrote, something has gone terribly wrong.
> And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else.
Concisely, discernment.
So your comment about “artistic quality” may apply. But from your ends sentence It seems you equate “artistic quality” to aesthetics , and I don’t think that’s what the author intended.
If you could indulge me a bit, the author in me wants to be pedantic about this. :)
In my defense, changing the definition of a term at the end of the article is begging to be misunderstood.
How did you develop your sense of taste in code? Any stories or lessons worth sharing?
There are two kinds of people, those that think it is clever to split people into just two groups, and everyone else.
Lost me here. If tastes don't converge in the limit, then there's no point and you're just justifying a hobby.
I've got a few things I made that just bring a lot of joy knowing it's the exact thing I wanted which you can't buy, and couldn't justify paying someone else to make either.
I know that's supposed to convey restraint, but it seems too much fiddling to me. But I've been using Vim for decades, so I only touch my .vimrc when something breaks.
Then he looks at one specific example of tinkering, the IDE, and sorts people as tinkerers based on that.
>There are plenty of people who still use the VSCode terminal as their default terminal, do not know what vim bindings are, GitHub desktop rather than the cli (at the very least). I’m not saying these are bad things necessarily, just that this should be the minimum, not the median.
Couldn't someone not tinker with an IDE and still tinker with other things? I mean clearly you dont have to tinker with everything that can possibly be tinkered with, right? What is it about the IDE that makes it necessary to tinker with?
It seems like this was the main motivation for the article and then it got a bit over-abstracted.
There's one story from Macintosh era where he spent weeks harassing one engineer over the calculator app: "it looks too bloated, it looks afwul, these lines are terrible.." until the engineer got fed up and said "here this is the Macintosh Calculator App: Steve Edition. You get to pick your font, your layout, your color theme." And Steve sat there for hours literally tinkering on a calculator app until he got what he wanted.
He tried to get Paul Rand to change the colors on the NeXT logo--who promptly directed Steve to go have s*x with himself.
There was one point in the Apple Store's inception where they had basically reached done, and Steve decides that he didn't like a certain aspect of it, which was essentially going to require them to redo the entire thing. So he did, and they started from scratch. I think it might have been the Carrara marble floors but I can't remember for certain.
I'm not saying I have immense respect for the guy as a human being, but he was absolutely a notorious tinkerer--a complete menace of one.
edit: I lied, the connection is that if you don't try many things, you won't know what's good and what's bad, and if you don't tinker, you won't try many things.