Trigger Warning, do not read if easily offended or if against introspection.
Downvotes? Would this have been upvoted?:
"Python 3.6 is really cool and looks fairly compact, especially when you're used to nesting callbacks, using promises, or fibers in Node.js. That said, arrow functions provide some of that compactness in ES6."
It's interesting how a certain verbal style resonates better or worse in certain communities, even if the content is held approximately fixed:
"Python 3.6 is really cool because of comprehensions."
"Python 3.6 is lit af bruh cuz dem list comps."
"dis lang is dope cuz ONE liners tho."
"python is fucking [i for its in me]"
For example, if I tried to teach a bunch of inner city kids about Python sounding like the average HackerNews user, they would never learn anything! For those of you that teach kids, you'll probably understand, everyone else will probably take offense to this, don't say I didn't warn you.
Communities like this (HackerNews) lack diversity -- we're all the same flavor of nerd, and that's boring as fuck, isn't it? We tend to agree with each other, and are diametrically opposed to people who try to burst our bubble. Clearly we're right about everything because we have been validated by our fancy BS's in honors physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and other sciences (oh, and engineering, if you're second-rate (shh! some people don't like mean jokes)).
There was a post on here about democracy after the Trump victory (or right before?). And the majority consensus of the nerds on this site was that government should not have unlimited power, and it should make itself easy to change, or replace, if needed. I.e., there should be no runaway governments, which we're stuck with. People should have the power to change things. For the most part, you guys agree with that, which I find incredibly ironic.
HackerNews community is extremely diverse, that's why people strive to write more clearly, otherwise some C++ programmer from Russia or a hardware engineer from China wouldn't understand a thing.
I +1 for the overall insight, but it's logicial and desirable to have small communities of people alike. As long as you have many of them, that are all very different and their members are part of several of them. It know it's the case for me (I'm part active on HN, reddit, imgur, twitter but IRL in sport, charity and porn), and I believe a lot of people are too here.
So I think we are OK.
HN is indeed a bubble, but it's a fantastic one that would lose a lot of value if the liquid it came from was diluted.
>"For example, if I tried to teach a bunch of inner city kids about Python sounding like the average HackerNews user, they would never learn anything! "
I wouldn't try to do that myself, precisely because they're illiterate. They have much bigger problems than the accessibility of learning a programming language. They need to be functional members of society, and one important part of that is communication.
