> Take aways as an ex-builder - we build complicated shapes as our ‘entry homes'
I actually dislike the ersatz complexity of our developer builds. It also has the potential to create costly maintenance issues later on down the line. I would far rather have a well insulated Scandinavian box that is easy to repair.
If anybody is interested Stewart Brand writes about it in his book <em>How Buildings Learn</em>. Unfortunately our architects refuse to.
How Buildings Learn This was influential to me.
I am 100% with you that it is going to take a community to solve this problem.
I'm not against paying money, as long as the community gets something for it. We could pay whatever it's going to take to tear it down. Then pay 175M to build a new building over 20-30 years (Using Boston's hancock tower as an example). And then just end up with some luxury real estate rentals like what happened in Boston's Fenway.
A new building isn't going to evaporate yearly maintenance, or, by itself, magically create money either. In fact, a lot of artist new buildings in major cities with lofty idea become impossible to maintain. (https://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp/0140139966 is a great book that covers some of the ways money is wasted on some new architecture, or how some money was wasted in the past with over architecture).
I'd also take that appraisals opinion with a grain of salt, given where it came from.
What if we approached it more like what is the city missing, what can give back to the community if money were invested. Office space? Nah. Garden? Na . .
> talks like this one which points out the odd parts of OOP.
Thank you. Thanks to watching this Zed Shaw vid—and I'm being totally serious now—I now understand why I have grown SO frustrated with programming over the last 20 years. The last time I remember really enjoying programming was when I was writing Unix scripts to automate downloading forum threads on the WELL via netcom.com, an early ISP based in San Jose.
I have been trying to learn OOP, Java, Perl, Python, CSS, html, blah blah blah for ten years now and getting increasingly frustrated. Recently I thought it was because I was a victim of info overload—not even Codecademy could reduce the onslaught of Everything to a narrow enough trickle that I could learn something.
NOW I see that it's really something completely different: pretty much everything sucks. Zed explains HOW it sucks. (And it's no surprise, really: if you don't DESIGN something properly in the beginning, then whatever you use the tool (programming language) for is going to suck. A Stewart Brand book taught me that.) And the answer to "Why does it suck?" is that we didn't have smart enough people around to design all this stuff. We need more people like Steve Wozniak, Einstein, Larry Wall, and Da Vinci.
Anyway, /u/dev_bry, thank you SO much for posting this Z Shaw vid link. Now I understand why I've been so frustrated learning (recent) programming languages. They suck, the books on them suck, and all these hundreds and thousands of app and language designers, not to mention the writers who write books that supposedly "teach" you about them, also suck. Everyone needs to go back to Tolkien, a dude who actually knows how to write a sentence. I'm reading Weisfeld's Object-Oriented Thought Process and this guy is a sloppy, disorganized, irresponsible, and inefficient writer and teacher. (There is no place for "attitude" in a book like this—but that certainly doesn't stop Matt from playing coy hipster and stopping to tossing in completely irrelevant remarks every so often in his sorry-ass manner of a poor attempt at humor.)