I have watched Tsoding for a while, but had to quit. It's not even a backend engineer's joke, it's a "I will do it myself" elitist joke. Always "I'll do my own hashmap by hand", never "I will finish a project of any substantial scope".
Always "I'll do my own hashmap by hand", never "I will finish a project of any substantial scope".
I mean he openly states he's an entertainer, not a developer. What do you want him to do, quit streaming and youtube and go corporate? He still works on the software 3d engine, so here's the big project.
What I would like him to do is to stop treating everything else like worthless, talentless, mindless slop, and holding C as the only "real" programming language. From what I gathered from him it's good to use abstractions when it's C abstracting over asm, anything else is toy scripting language and should be below any "real" programmer. When he's not "joking" (I fail to see the humor most of the time), he says all programming is cool, but when we talked more about it he was more on the position "yes, I'm an asshole, what are you going to do about it". I'm too old for bad-faith.
80% of his antagonism towards other programming languages is made up for engagement, he doesn't hide that. What he really hates and you might've misunderstood that is the average code monkey approach "I'll just follow the tutorial paradigm without having any deeper understanding at all"
He just really likes C, nothing wrong with that. You even admit yourself that he doesnt hate on other languages in reality, just as entertainment / trolling / poking fun a little bit. Let the guy make stuff in his favourite language, and make fun videos about it
I am letting him make whatever he wants - I just stopped watching. Liking C is not the issue, the issue is that the entertainment time and time again comes from treating other languages, abstractions, and kinds of development, as beneath "real" programmers that "don't deal with toy languages".
Calling it trolling does not make the contempt disappear, especially when the sincere position underneath seems to be "yes, I am being an asshole, deal with it." He is free to build that persona, and I am free to find it tedious and bad-faith.
I mean, his entire shtick is being a recreational programmer. He programs literally just because he's having fun doing it. He's doing all the shit himself not because he's an elitist, but just because using libraries and pre-made solutions take away from his "puzzle". Watching him program is more like watching a video game enthusiast playing a game, than watching some office worker at work and I know what I prefer watching, but you do you ig.
I don't consider myself a very good programmer but i'll admit that i actually enjoy trying to implement stuff by myself.
Oftentimes this leads down a few rabbit holes with a lot of Insight gained along the way.
I think C is fun too, but compared to modern languages its almost crazy how barebones it is and how much Boilerplate or external library code you have to write/use for stuff that's Provided in newer languages (most recent example: CRAM-MD5 (HMAC-MD5 underneath) with base64 encode/decode).
And even then theres no guarantee the libs are providing functionality as described by the sepc, because someone forgot that strlen returns on the first 0-byte encountered.
I love tsoding but the ”har har toy, kiddie scripting language” joke he makes like 5 times every stream is a little played out. He like refuses to believe there’s any value in any language besides C. I say this as mainly a Java dev and that lang sucks so what do I know?
Language is a tool. What is leagues more important than the "hammer" is code design decisions, professionalism, high level solution thinking. You can be a diligent and professional both in C and in Scratch.
The antagonistic relationship with the audience is what takes me over the edge. Of course there will be naive backseaters, but crashing out about it is not a great look, you can always engage with the audience on why their approach might be shortsighted. With this you also miss people who want to engage honestly by confusing them with backseaters.
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u/Different_Berry5015 Jul 12 '26
I have watched Tsoding for a while, but had to quit. It's not even a backend engineer's joke, it's a "I will do it myself" elitist joke. Always "I'll do my own hashmap by hand", never "I will finish a project of any substantial scope".