Those sux when maintaining, investigating and debugging code. They break IDE functionality too. You can't put breakpoints in them. You don't see them properly in views.

It is trading off useless aesthetics over practicality.

Eh, whats the difference between spring auto-generating them at build time via an annotation or an IDE auto-generating them at write time?

That's typically _not_ what post-modernism is, that's at best a misunderstanding, but more likely a strawman.

The only point on which all post-modernists agree is a refutation of meta-narratives (and to be explicit: "here is no reality out there, it's all just human-created abstractions" is a meta-narrative).

A very, very charitable interpretation is that you are maybe conflating it with Frankfurt School of critical theory, because it is also somewhat used/based on psychoanalysis (sigh) (latest postmodernists use psychoanalysis way less, also post-modernism isn't built on it, contrary to critical theory). Postmodernism is mostly post-marxism though, while critical theory is mostly neo-marxist imho (also, i don't want to be too critical of Frankfurt's school, i think most of their bad rep is caused by bad vulgarization/pop-science, most critics i read don't seems to understand why it's wrong either).

I do think that the reason most people conflate the two is because of an idiotic canadian psychoanalyst who can't read (or at least, can't understand what he read), who _clearly_ has no degree in literature or philosophy, and try to appear smarter than he is. He invent citations of the books, and sometime state that Derrida mean something when Derrida hismself wrote the opposite. 8th grader would do better and their reading comprehension assignment. He is wrong. Read and think by yourself.

It's less stupidity and more "if we don't prove that we meet x control in y compliance framework, our auditors will deem us non-compliant and we will be fined into oblivion"

It can be a grand number of things, but lack of the highschool curriculum is unlikely to be one of them, in my opinion. Rest assured, you're far from the only one struggling, I'd say most people I've encountered in academic philosophy tend to struggle a tad more with it than (their) other fields of studies. It is what it is, really, it sort of comes with the territory.

Of course there are just some that are less accessible than others, due to writing style or size of their philosophical project (Hegel is an example of both of those qualities). A lot of French philosophy since the second world war, Baudrillard being no exception, is generally characterized as such as well amongst the anglo audience, although I don't think that this is entirely fair.

I'd say the best thing you can do is never attempt to understand it through Wikipedia, but pick up a full book instead and read it a second time if the argument doesn't make sense the first time. Of course there are some authors I would avoid as a beginner, but someone like Kant is fine for even your first philosopher, and is amongst the biggest names in modern philosophy. Prolegomena and Critique of Pure Reason are two books of his about the same thing written in two opposite ways, the former from easy to difficult, the latter vice versa, I always recommend those.

Sartre and Wittgenstein are both somewhat odd for a contemporary philosophy course. I'm curious why they chose that arrangement. Nevertheless, being able to hold a conversation about either of them is already quite solid, plus you get three philosophers for the price of two! :)

you aren't stupid. philosophers forgot how to write clearly sometime in the past century.

More than likely it is "just you", the page on post-structuralism seems clear enough to me (as far as I can tell, the post-structuralists are criticising structuralism because they don't think the structures are sufficiently powerful). What that means in detail is unclear - understanding a position and thinking it is obviously silly is a completely valid stance when dealing with philosophers. Or just having no interest in the questions philosophers often ask (for example, if structuralism seems to be fundamentally invalid then bothering to take a post-structuralist stance to criticise it it requires a certain type of pedantic and argumentative mind). Or the easy explanation which is misunderstanding [0].

I liked the Barthes example on the post-structuralist page - if a text's author doesn't necessarily have the authority to assert the meaning of a text, then the idea that they text is necessarily part of some identifiable structure is open to question. I assume that means that the same text might fit into multiple contexts with different meanings and trying to fit it with one static meaning based on its initial context is doomed, and that suggests structuralist critique is either insufficient or overly reductive.

[0] Although arguably all of philosophy is people misunderstanding each other; otherwise it may as well be a settled field.

Philosophy is mostly wordcellery.

Hard sciences are shape rotation.

One is basically stochastic parottism, and the other is dealing with reality.

Philosophy has no end-game or practical applications. You can make anything up, and so long as enough souls latch onto it via pattern recognition, you have achieved memetic reproduction.

With hard sciences, you can talk all you want, but if your hypotheses are consistently disproven, only the untrained and deranged will latch onto your ideas.

There is nothing to penetrate in philosophy. It's not a reflection of reality, but a reflection of the people it captivates.

It's very little different than music, or any other sort of entertainment. Dare I call it an art. In that case, I would say its recent interpretations are lacking.

A personal aside: much of this era's approach to philosophy reminds me of Fabianism -- wretched, cowardly, and completely superfluous to living an integrated life.

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You think 2 minutes is bad, try using fortify. Scans can easily be hours.