this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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[–] pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

All libertarian ideologies (including left and right wing anarchism) are anti-social and primitivist.

It is anti-social because it arises from a hatred of working in a large groups. It's impossible to have any sort of large-scale institution without having rules that people want to follow, and libertarian ideology arises out of people hating to have to follow rules, i.e. to be a respectable member of society, i.e. they hate society and don't want to be social. They thus desire very small institutions with limited rules and restrictions. Right-wing libertarians envision a society dominated by small private businesses while left-wing libertarians imagine a society dominated by either small worker-cooperative, communes, or some sort of community council.

Of course, everyone of all ideologies opposes submitting to hierarchies they find unjust, but hatred of submitting to hierarchies at all is just anti-social, as any society will have rules, people who write the rules, people who enforce the rules. It is necessary for any social institution to function. It is part of being an adult and learning to live in a society to learn to obey the rules, such as traffic rules. Sometimes it is annoying or inconvenient, but you do it because you are a respectable member of society and not a rebellious edgelord who makes things harder on everyone else because they don't obey basic rules.

It is primitivist because some institutions simply only work if they are very large. You cannot have something like NASA that builds rocket ships operated by five people. You are going to always need an enormous institution which will have a ton of people, a lot of different levels of command ("hierarchy"), strict rules for everyone to follow, etc. If you tried to "bust up" something like NASA or SpaceX to be small businesses they simply would lose their ability to build rocket ships at all.

Of course, anarchists don't mind, they will say, "who cares about rockets? They're not important." It reminds me of the old meme that spread around where someone asked anarchists how their tiny communes would be able to organize current massive supply chains in our modern societies and they responded by saying that the supply chain would be reduced to just people growing beans in their backyard and eating it, like a feudal peasant. They won't even defend that their system could function as well as our modern economy but just says modern marvels of human engineering don't even matter, because they are ultimately primitivists at heart.

I never understood the popularity of libertarian and anarchist beliefs in programming circles. We would never have entered the Information Age if we had an anarchism or libertarian system. No matter how much they might pretend these are the ideal systems, they don't even believe it themselves. If a libertarian has a serious medical illness, they are either going to seek medical help at a public hospital or a corporate hospital. Nobody is going to seek medical help at a "hospital small business" ran out of someone's garage. We all intuitively and implicitly understand that large swathes of economy that we all take advantage of simply cannot feasibly be ran by small organizations, but libertarians are just in denial.

[–] jdeath@lemm.ee 2 points 4 hours ago

i like both sides here! i bought a website for such people, but I'm not sure if there are any (others). stateless mutation dotcom. pretty clever i thought

[–] juliebean@lemm.ee 10 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

wow, there are some really steaming takes on anarchism in the comments here.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago

Real State of Exception Hours

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 48 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

Nothing wrong with classes in functional programming though. Just return a new instance of the class from your method, rather than mutating an existing instance.

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 9 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Javascript:

I heard you like mutating class data so I'm mutating the data you can put in your class data, dawg.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 points 6 hours ago

To be fair to JavaScript (I feel gross just saying that), it does have the ability to do some more functional-like programming as well. For example, many of its more recent array methods like filter, map, and reduce are pure functions.

[–] underisk@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 hours ago

JavaScript: a language for mutants.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 16 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Right, I think the two aren't as different as they appear. You can think of a closure as an object with just one method.

If OO programming is fundamentally about objects sending messages to each other, then there are many ways to approach that. Some of those ways are totally compatible with functional programming.

The legacy of C++ has dominated what OOP is "supposed" to be, but it doesn't have to work like that.

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[–] zqwzzle@lemmy.ca 7 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Dunno how accurate this is but if you like doing those quizzes see where you fall on leftist values. https://leftvalues.github.io/index.html

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 8 hours ago

Marxism-Leninism: 0%

Phew. Demsoc followed by market anarchist I'll take it. It's not like I'd actually know what proper anarchism will look like so how am I supposed to get it as a result.

[–] danc4498@lemmy.world 27 points 20 hours ago (11 children)

Do anarchists think anarchy will result in a system with no classes?

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 points 10 hours ago

Anarchists recognize class as a social construct rather than a biological imperative or a free market condition. As a result, they will often make a point of transgressing or undermining the pageantry that class-centric organizations cling to.

Its not that they think "no classes" will be a result so much as they think "explicitly defying class" is a political act.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 11 points 12 hours ago

Depends on the anarchist. Many would focus on seeking the absence of involuntary power hierarchies. A manager who distributes work and does performance evaluations isn't intrinsically a problem, it's when people doing the work can't say "no, they're a terrible manager and they're gone", or you can't walk away from the job without risking your well-being.

Anarchists and communists/socialists have a lot of overlap. There's also overlap with libertarians, except libertarians often focus on coercion from the government and don't give much regard to economic coercion. An anarchist will often not see much difference between "do this or I hit you" and "do this or starve": they both are coercive power hierarchies.
Some anarchists are more focused on removing sources of coercion. Others are more focused on creating relief from it. The "tear it down" crowd are more visible, but you see anarchists in the mutual aid and community organization crowds as well.

[–] underwire212@lemm.ee 4 points 10 hours ago
[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 5 points 11 hours ago

Anarchism is not the thing you're told about in the media. It isn't a total lack of all government. It's a removal of hierarchical systems and exploitation. There still needs to be systems to protect people from these. They'd just be done through concensus.

This page has more information if you want to learn. https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionA.html#seca1

[–] lugal@sopuli.xyz 46 points 20 hours ago (58 children)

Yes, because anarchism is against all hierarchies and the class system is a form of hierarchy. Instead, decisions should me made collectively, for example in councils open for everyone

[–] SneakyAlba@ioc.exchange 9 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

@lugal @danc4498 Anarchism is against specifically unjust hierarchies, it can permit certain ones to exist within individual communities should the community find it justified, but still strongly favours not having any where possible.

There are a group of anarchists who would still believe in the idea of an adult > child hierarchy as they struggle to imagine an alternative world without it.

[–] pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Anarchism thus becomes meaningless as anyone who defends certain hierarchies obviously does so because they believe they are just. Literally everyone on earth is against "unjust hierarchies" at least in their own personal evaluation of said hierarchies. People who support capitalism do so because they believe the exploitative systems it engenders are justifiable and will usually immediately tell you what those justifications are. Sure, you and I might not agree with their argument, but that's not the point. To say your ideology is to oppose "unjust hierarchies" is to not say anything at all, because even the capitalist, hell, even the fascist would probably agree that they oppose "unjust hierarchies" because in their minds the hierarchies they promote are indeed justified by whatever twisted logic they have in their head.

Telling me you oppose "unjust hierarchies" thus tells me nothing about what you actually believe, it does not tell me anything at all. It is as vague as saying "I oppose bad things." It's a meaningless statement on its own without clarifying what is meant by "bad" in this case. Similarly, "I oppose unjust hierarchies" is meaningless statement without clarifying what qualifies "just" and "unjust," and once you tell me that, it would make more sense you label you based on your answer to that question. Anarchism thus becomes a meaningless word that tells me nothing about you. For example, you might tell me one unjust hierarchy you want to abolish is prison. It would make more sense for me to call you a prison abolitionist than an anarchist since that term at least carries meaning, and there are plenty of prison abolitionists who don't identify as anarchist.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 5 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Parents have natural bootmaker authority and if you want to be a good parent then you realise that the kids also have it: They, or maybe better put their genome, know how they need to be raised, and try to teach you, as well as (with increasing age) seek out the exact bootmakers that seem sensible. Worst thing you can do as a parent is to think that learning is a one-way street.

[–] KindaABigDyl@programming.dev 8 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Isn't anarchy just against imposed hierarchy? Most anarchists I've met are okay with heirarchies that form naturally, and believe those hierarchies to be enough for society to function, hence why they call themselves anarchists, not minarchists.

[–] lugal@sopuli.xyz 10 points 16 hours ago

I have never heard the term minarchist. Many anarchists say, we need structures against the building of hierarchies, like avoiding knowledge hierarchies by doing skillshares.

Natural authorities are a different topic. I think Kropotkin was an example of a leader who was accepted because everyone agreed with him. Once he said something people didn't like, they rejected him as a leader. You can call this a hierarchy if you like. I wouldn't because he couldn't coerce his followers but this is pure terminology.

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[–] missingno@fedia.io 5 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Anarchy means "without hierarchy". Classes are a hierarchy, so by definition it wouldn't be anarchy if you don't dissolve class.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Classes, as per Marx, are foremost identified by the economical position of people, and not necessary a hierarchy as such, that's a secondary effect of how classes happen to work towards their own self-interest. If, in an anarchist utopia, one population freely chooses to live in a high-tech skyscraper doing engineering work, and another neighbouring one grows coffee in the rain forest, then their economical position is vastly different and they have different interests, thus they are different classes, but that doesn't mean that they need to be nasty to another.

Most importantly though this is all just arguing semantics and Marx didn't get anarchism anyway, mixing the theoretical bodies is usually more headache than it's worth.

[–] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 10 hours ago

Yeah... I'd argue, from my anarchist view point, that Marx nearly had it. Humans and unjust hierarchies have existed longer than economics, so, I feel that to be an oversight on his part. To my thinking, economic division is a mechanism of creating or sustaining a hierarchy of classes. The problem isn't purely economic nor sociological but both, that is socio-economic (like electricity and magnetism are make up electro-magnetism).

Economics (wealthy disparity), religion (castes), and violence are all mechanisms used to separate people into hierarchies of power and allow a small number to exercise power over others. Any hierarchy of societal power results in repression. The Soviets betrayed the Makhnovists, rolled tanks into Czechoslovakia to prevent self-determination, and committed genocide via forced relocation of "problematic" ethnic groups to destabilize any resistance to their hierarchy of power that made all subservient to Moscow.

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[–] a14o@feddit.org 24 points 20 hours ago

Revolution is a monad

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