> a bad article written by someone who I guess must be a novice who thinks he knows something now but will look back on this 5 years later and cringe
The article's author appears to be Robert Lefkowitz. If it is, then the author transitioned from nuclear physics to programming in the 1970s, has been a speaker at PyCon, currently seems to be writing software in Haskell, Ruby, and Java, gave several talks at OSCon in 2013, and is currently a CTO while also working with corporations to open proprietary code ... among other things.
I won't further belabor the point, but what you just said (and how you said it) is one of my least favorite aspects of HN.
Oh, I have no idea if he's wrong or not. Honestly, programming isn't something I usually think deeply about; I'm sort of tired of all the usual arguments.
But you don't have to assume that someone's a novice to disagree with them. That seems to be a common thing for programmers to do to each other and it's disgusting.
Sean wasn't making points. He was being obtuse and dismissive, and made repeated statements about the author and how much he was laughing at the idea that this was being read by anybody.
I read it: I enjoyed it. I didn't run into anything I didn't understand, but I did feel like the phraseology was chosen to offend rather than inform.
For example, "global variable" was used to describe any memory cell that could change from any point in the program, either directly or indirectly. Obviously any public function (setter or method) can change that value. If the instance variable is static or a member of a singleton, then it really is a global variable, but if the object is simply long-lived it might be equivalent with regards to the impact it has on debugging.
Given that this isn't the ordinary use of the term "global variable", one has to read the article to understand that this is what is intended, but at least the article isn't very long. However because the author chose to overload the term (rightly or wrongly), it makes extracting the essence from a few quotes very difficult.
However if you read the article: What part did you have trouble understanding?
You don't get to be a good writer via ad hominem attacks either. Having had several interactions with the author, I'd say he has a knack for putting forth controversial theses like the one in the article. I've disagreed with lots of them--but I've always gotten smarter thinking about why I've disagreed with them (and have often been left with the suspicion that he really might be right).
When I was younger I used to read things I thought were wrong and smugly dismissed them as due to some flaw on the part of the author. Luckily I've outgrown that. (Good thing too, as I no longer do embarrassing things like asserting that a multi-decade veteran of the industry must be some novice.)
The article's author appears to be Robert Lefkowitz. If it is, then the author transitioned from nuclear physics to programming in the 1970s, has been a speaker at PyCon, currently seems to be writing software in Haskell, Ruby, and Java, gave several talks at OSCon in 2013, and is currently a CTO while also working with corporations to open proprietary code ... among other things.
I won't further belabor the point, but what you just said (and how you said it) is one of my least favorite aspects of HN.