Socks and Sandals

...has arrived in the form of a blog post by one Lawrence Kesteloot. In this post, he attempts to show that languages are distinguished as either “production” or “toy” languages (troll terms if I’ve ever heard them) and then proceeds to slam SICP and Lisp and generally anything he doesn’t understand.

My biggest problem with this article is not the fact that someone with a masters degree in computer science doesn’t know what a fixed point is, but rather the fact that it nearly proves the Blub paradox to be true all by itself. Clearly, this author has become “institutionalized” in the Java mindset and construes brevity of expression with inscrutability. He maligns powerful languages features and elegance in favor of “understandability” by the average programmer and then implicitly marks himself as such by misconstruing boilerplate code that an IDE generates for him with readability. Ever read the code generated by Axis? No… why would you? That’s the least readable Java can be, in my estimation, but the point is that I don’t have to read it. Lisp excels at that kind of code generation task. The author seems to believe that thinking about the code you’re working with is a bad thing and that if it takes any effort at all to understand it must be bad. This thing we’re in is an art, people, not a science.

The speculation about Yahoo!’s rewrite of Viaweb also does not help his case. Yahoo! trucks in average programmers galore. Surely, there are many good and great ones there, too, just not in as great a number. As such, its not unbelievable that they could not find Lisp programmers: you typically have to be looking for something before you find it. Also, why would a Lisp guy want to work at Yahoo!? The coolest project they have going right now is written in Java. The kind of guy who hacks Lisp is unlikely to be pining for a job at Microsoft or IBM or even Yahoo! these days, nes pas? I do know some excellent “production” people (around Philly, even) that hack on Lisp and Scheme in production, but they appear to be the exception rather than the rule. Finally, I’m assuming that the author has never heard the fact that lots of the big financials choose a very high-level functional language when they need to make sure their systems are right. I bet this is partially so they can attract the very best people to those positions, as well.

I suppose the author might have also taken Amazon’s choice to dump Lisp as a sign that Lisp is not production. (assuming he was aware that it was, in fact, originally built in Lisp and C) I, instead, would take that as an indication that Amazon outgrew the ability to employ only the best people they could find. Business growth has a way of doing that to you. The distribution of talent and passion appear to be two somewhat uncorrelated power law curves and finding people at the top of both curves simultaneously is a task that will make anyone’s hair fall out and liver get harder. Plus, there are many business realities that make Blub languages more attractive for any number of reasons: talent pool, employee turnover, ramp-up time mitigation, cultural integration, etc. I write this article after having just dumped Ruby on Rails in favor of Java at my startup for some of these very reasons.

To this author I would only say that a language does not make something “production”. People do. Throw Alan Cox , Ingo Molnar and Guy Steele in a room and I bet they could write a better mousetrap in Brainf*ck if they were excited enough about it. Its never about the language. Its about the people. Full stop.

Last night I gave a presentation on Scala to the Philly Lambda group. The slides are available here. It was a pretty good time and about 15 people or so showed up for the talk. The space was graciously provided in the really cool-looking Cira Centre down at 30th St. by Aaron Feng of Algorithmics. Thanks to Aaron and all who attended; I had a great time presenting!

Happy New Year, everybody!

As the new year rolls around, I find it to be an introspective moment this time around. Normally, I’m not into the New Years resolutions and all that jazz. However, late in 2007 some crazy stuff went down that forced me to rethink my methods of dealing with people. I’m going to have to work on that this year and get a better grip on my interactions.

Right after that unfolded, Zed Shaw posted one of his infamous rants , this time regarding the Rails community and his status therein. I had read it and a number of people had also independently sent it to me, as well. I thought about this article a lot over the past few days, mostly because of the coincident timing with my own realizations regarding social interactions. While I found this article viscerally funny in places, I find it to be a tragedy overall.

Zed’s rant is essentially a view into his dealings with others since he got into Ruby (and then Rails). Up until he updated it yesterday, it was a pretty poor representation of self-awareness and introspective ability. Now, he partially reflects that his situation is of his own making and he’s to be credited for that. But the vitriol in this post can’t easily be wiped away by a correction and he’s burned some bridges forever with his rant. As someone who’s been known to wield the flamethrower over the rope bridge with glee in the past, I can say with surety that this always comes back to bite you in the ass. Also, his original statements still stand and needlessly hurt and incite anger towards people who essentially disagree(d) with Zed.

Then, the updated post goes on to amend the post with some semblances of self-awareness but is almost comically conflicting in places. He goes on to trash ThoughtWorks and then recommend their software. Huh? But then the update drops back into the original vitriol and just sinks any valid points that Zed has into a sea of raw emotion that makes it very hard for a reader to stay focused on the facts and happenings of the situations he outlines.

Personally, I just wish Zed would have maybe just put this in a drawer after he wrote it like Abe Lincoln used to do. There are many graceful ways in which one can back out of a community and I for one would like to have seen a clearly-talented Zed Shaw choose one of them. Given what he did, I can’t see ever hiring this guy: imagine what he might say or do if I ever disagreed with him?