For the same reason that carpenters do not have conferences about saws and hammers. It's an old tool with well-known deficiencies and it doesn't attract an idealistic, evangelical crowd that can write manifestos and narratives about it.
We absolutely do have those conferences! I've been to dozens.
Lots of idealists and evangelicals in the woodworking world as well, probably more so than any other world I've been in. Makes technology look fairly tame.
A conference about hammers is closer to a conference on arrays. But a conference on carpentry is closer to a conference on novel algorithms and memory structures.
There are many which are less modernly advertised (usually paper/newsgroup/email) that will draw 100+ people easily.
Including planned events with participants in the dozens, Id say you could count at least 100 a year. I'd consider that since that's the population of smaller tech conferences.
Something like 'The 393rd International Conference on Hammers'? With people presenting about the latest developments in hammers and how they're using hammers in new ways? You've been to dozens of those?
The OP said saws and hammers, and there are conferences on hand tools which largely focus on saws, hammers and hand planes.
If we want to be literal then I don't know of anything on _just_ saws and hammers, but in the quite adjacent space (one or two hand carpentry tools also a focus) - yes.
Well yeah we do have general conferences on programming languages. But the point is we don't have a specific conference on C, like you wouldn't have a specific conference on a simple hammer.
But that's the insight people are bringing up in this thread - nobody specialises in C.
Lots of people learn and use C as an every day tool. I'm a Java and Ruby programmer - but I have to work with C as an ABI and an extension language. Python programmers have to work with C as an extension language. There are DB developers who use C.
I don't know anyone who describes themselves as a 'C programmer' like you would 'Ruby programmer'.
But tech also has conferences on specific languages. Seems like a JS, C#, C++, Java, python, etc. conference could be analogous to hand tools for carpentry.
There's definitely manifestos and narratives about it, but it's lumped under manifestos / narratives about "simplicity" and "the unix way". As for evangelicalism, you're probably right about its absence.
Conferences about carpentry in general != conferences solely about hammers.
There are plenty of systems programming conferences where the majority of work being presented is written in C. That is very different from a conference about C itself.
I'm SO enjoying all the comments about "yes, there are saw and hammer conferences." I'll have to ask my HVAC technician neighbor if he's ever been to one.
I’d assume the average practitioner who attends systems conferences uses C as one of their primary languages. It seems like it would be redundant to have a language specific conference when it would overlap so much in form and audience with the systems oriented ones
Saws and hammers probably aren't the best example. We complain about our trusty old tools far more than I'd imagine most carpenters complain about an old chisel for example.
I remember back in 2012 or so someone made a really clever karma-farming bot on Reddit. Here’s how I (foggily) remember it working:
- It subscribed to subreddits like /r/pics and /r/funny that largely consisted of posting links (not text posts)
- When it calculated that a post was rocketing toward the front page, it would look at all the past times the URL had been submitted.
- If none of those had made it to the front page, it would find the most upvoted top-level comment, copy the text verbatim, and make the same comment on the post that would end up on the front page.
For the longest time, everyone just thought that this account was some super-interesting, super-funny person who always had the perfect joke or perfect comment for any given situation. Sure it was a bit odd that they never replied to anyone, but that also just felt like part of their mystique.
Then someone got the receipts and outed the account as a bot and the show was all over. I wouldn’t be shocked to see someone on HN do the same thing, but I also think HN isn’t big enough for a grift like that to pass by unnoticed.
There was a blog post that reached first page here on HN a few months ago. IIRC, only one commentator alluded that "the post is so nonsensical as if it was written by GPT-3, no solid arguments just mishmash of phrases"...surprise, it was written by GPT-3.
(BTW, I'm not suggesting anyone here is a bot, obviously)
I used GPT-3 to generate responses to someone who argued a post is GPT-3 generated on an old account. It was pretty funny - it fooled them, but smaller text is usually harder to detect as bot-generated.
We are all sets of the same memes, recurring over and over.
(A cool and weird experiment: try playing several shows all at the same time. There'll be eerie moments when the audio syncs up, or one show surreally reacts to another.)
That just seems like the birthday paradox rather than anything truly eerie: as you add more shows, the odds that two won’t have something going on at the same second decreases.
(Also, ad breaks represent somewhat standard points at which shows would break up programming.)
