| ▲ | altmanaltman 7 hours ago |
| Kind of meaningless if you let "taste" be a vaguely-defined term. Like, what do you mean by "taste"? How is it a differentiator? Does Apple have taste? Is the reason one open source app is better than the other because the devs of the first one have more "taste"? Seems like a philosophical article, but rather than exploring it deeply, it kind of just abandons it at the "hey man, everyone can create apps, so you better have that taste, aaight?" paradigm which is dangerously close to just common sense. |
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| ▲ | gopalv 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Like, what do you mean by "taste"? Imagine the scene from Ratatouille, where Remy explains "taste" and the brother finds it impossible to understand what it is ("Food is food"). The dad goes from being annoyed that Remy is a picky eater instead decides to put him to work as a taster. Gives him the job of approving forage that comes into the family & protect others from being poisoned. The reason we say "taste" is because that's the closest parallel. When it is even more vague, I call it a "code smell". |
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| ▲ | altmanaltman 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Okay but you can define what good food is, right? Like if you're the best chef in the world, you can clearly define what "taste" of a particular food is the best. It might be subjective but it wouldn't be vague, the chef can clearly pinpoint what makes the food taste better instead of just being like "its what you feel" or other vague terms. My point is that the article doesn't delve into what is good taste in the context of coding. I understand the metaphysical meaning of what taste means but you need to define what it means in your particular context. If you leave it to be subjective, then everyone has good taste which means taste cannot be the difference between good and bad software which is the premise of the post. |
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| ▲ | andai 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'd say taste-as-subjective-something is largely irrelevant. If something "looks good" but hurts to use, that's not much help. If it looks like ass, but is a delight to use, that's not good either (because most people won't reach the point of actually experiencing it). So you need "looks good" and you need "actually delightful to use". Taste seems to be orthogonal to both of those. Or perhaps (two kinds of?) taste is involved in each one. At which point we define taste as two unrelated things: skill in aesthetics, and skill in ux. I've seen apps that looked amazing (Taste #1, aesthetics) but made me go, "Okay, did they actually try using this thing?" (Taste #2, usability). I think these tastes are completely orthogonal, from personal experience. I think the vast majority of designers suffer from Total Usability Taste Blindness. (And, though it feels a bit mean to point out, the vast majority of FOSS suffers from a total absence of both. The winning projects only win because they have no competition, they're the only free option available.) |
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| ▲ | bandrami 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Taste is a key concept in aesthetics and has had some great thinkers write about it. There's always some tension on whether taste can be taught, but I think the broad consensus is that it can but it's hard to do. |
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| ▲ | selridge 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The only book worth reading about taste is Distinction. Lots of people have written about it but most spin their wheels pretending class and upbringing are not involved. |
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| ▲ | kmijyiyxfbklao 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's purposefully undefined because it's a social concept, not an engineering one. And it's also subjective. You can tell because they use OpenClaw as an example of a tasteful project. I would put OpenClaw in the same category as memecoins in terms of taste. Obviously crypto can be way more harmful, but in terms of taste both are on the "internet meme" category, as helpful as OpenClaw can be. |
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| ▲ | andai 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | So, OpenClaw is literally a meme. It existed for months and didn't get much attention until it became a meme. And every day, you see people fell for the meme wholesale: "I bought a Mac Mini for OpenClaw, now how do I run GPT-5 on it locally?" The technical characteristics appear to be entirely irrelevant. (I'm not sure if taste even enters into the picture.. it appears to be a third category!) |
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| ▲ | embedding-shape 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Others like it" could be one definition. "I like it" can be another. Personally, it kind of differs depending on what I'm doing, what exactly it means. |
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| ▲ | altmanaltman 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Okay but what does it mean in the context of coding or software? Like if someone claims good taste is the differentiator fod good and bad in software, they should have some basic objective ways to measure it right? If its just vibes we're going with then everyone has subjective taste and everyone's app is good. Overall I still think its meaningless/lazy to talk about vague terms as guiding principles or key differentiators. | | |
| ▲ | skydhash 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Have you ever been tasked to maintain a badly coded legacy app? Have you ever read some snippet that is so clear you don’t have anything to edit? Those are the opposite points of things. It’s not objective because the computer doesn’t care anyway. It’s like a well written prose vs a drunk’s rambling. They could describe the same scene, but one is much pleasurable to listen to. Or strolling through a well-tended garden vs walking in a landfill. So it’s subjective, but you know instinctively what you prefer to work with. | | |
| ▲ | altmanaltman 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Again, all of those are metaphors that describe a feeling and not anything concrete. Like what makes a codebase feel like "strolling through a well-tended garden"--there has to be some objective measures for that, right? Some things like "it's easier to maintain" or "it has really good readability," etc? Why are we not talking specifics of this "taste" instead of using The Karate Kid wax-on wax-off type metaphors? And that is my central gripe with this piece--it doesn't care about the details and handwaves everything bad as having "bad taste." That is fundamentally lazy imo. | | |
| ▲ | skydhash an hour ago | parent [-] | | As I said, the computer does not care, neither would a robot care about a garden or a garbage dump as long as it can cross it. But we interact with the world through our senses and we categorize things with epithets like pleasant, disagreeable,… And when we can present things to others would generally find enjoyable and pleasing, we are deemed to have good taste. So the act of presenting and the judgement by others are what qualify the whole “taste” thing. The judgment is not yours to make, and presentation (either voluntarily or not) is all that needed for others to form an opinion. So your private code that no one else has seen? No one cares. The repo linked to your Show HN post? You will be judged based on that. |
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| ▲ | gtowey 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ah yes, "if it doesn't make sense to me personally, it clearly can't exist" |
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| ▲ | James_K 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Skill is your ability to achieve your objectives, taste is the ability to differentiate good from bad objectives. |
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| ▲ | altmanaltman 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Okay but how does taste let you do that? I get what skill means but what is it that lets you differentiate between good and bad objectively? Is it experience? exposure? or just having good design skills? The article would be better if it went into the crux of this issue instead of hand waving it over. |
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| ▲ | BoredPositron 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Taste is not something you can define as factotum it changes over time, over location and culture. |
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| ▲ | ryandrake 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's kind of useless if it can't be defined. Let's say I'm a software developer, and my product is criticized for "lacking taste." What can I possibly do to correct this, if we can't even agree on a definition? Let alone agree on what actions can be taken to "add taste" to the product. | | |
| ▲ | raddan 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | While in general engineers should define things, so that we can be clear about what we mean, there are plenty of things that are difficult to define that way. Love, happiness, satisfaction, for instance. You might argue "well those are emotions so they don't count" but you don't need to go far to find some more. What is the "perception of red"? What is the sensation of temperature (thermoception) or my sensation of my body in space (priprioception)? The sensations of these things are difficult to define--even if we have good explanations for how the physical world induces them--but they are experienced nearly universally by humans and we most people don't feel the need to define them to find them to be useful ideas. | |
| ▲ | dec0dedab0de 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you don't have any taste, you could work with someone who does have taste to do the interface design. Or you could copy popular patterns and designs, but that might lead to a worse experience if you copy the wrong things, or try to bend your project to fit a popular design that doesn't quite fit. If you like it the way it is, then guess what, you do have taste, tell them to fuck off and just keep it the way it is. The difficult part is being honest with yourself about why you like it the way it is. If you do honestly like it for what it is, then others probably will too, no one is really that unique. If you like it because you put a lot of effort into it, then you're just letting your emotions lie to you. | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It's kind of useless if it can't be defined That's just the programmer/logician in you screaming "unknown feeling!" :) Programming (for me at least) is as much of a creative endeavor as it's one of logic. You can train yourself to at least recognize "good" from "bad", even though it's much harder to teach yourself how to go from "blank" to "good", or even being able to actually define why something is better than another thing. Sometimes it's literally just "vibes" and that's OK. If you're unable to train this feeling in yourself, maybe the best course of action is to find someone you can tell is able to better use that particular skill, and ask for their feedback. | | |
| ▲ | skydhash 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Also studies. In art, especially painting and music, you do a lot of studies of masters’ works, to discern how they’ve decided to make their intention manifests. Same can happen with code. People may talk about readability, maintainability,… And it can be hard to improve in those aspects. So you read a lot of code that is lauded as good, figure how people goes from ideas to a written version of it, contrast it to your approach, a d reflect upon that. |
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| ▲ | ianbutler 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'd argue its not definable globally, but within whatever niches you're a part of it probably is. The reason I didn't try to define it when I wrote this is because the question stands good taste "to whom". So like you definitely probably can get pointers from people in your specific niche and if you've been in that niche long enough you've probably developed some level of taste and feeling for what people in that group like and need. | |
| ▲ | 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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