My New Favorite Blogger
Steve Yegge of Stevey's Blog Rants is my new favorite blogger. Why? Because, like Joel Spolsky, his writing is fantastic. He's funny, engaging, insightful and, unlike Joel, he is a real hard-core coder, he doesn't fake deep knowledge of software engineering.
But more than that, the guy really understands computers, really understands languages. He sees that the world of computers that we have around us is a fluke. All the decisions, all the architecture, all the languages, the tools, the databases, the protocols, the hardware, they are all the way they are because we zigged instead zagged. We are where we are because once we found something, anything, that worked sufficiently, we collectively moved on to the next pressing problem, and we haven't revisited the old decisions. Instead we keep applying band-aids to our old concepts, trying ever so hard to keep pushing the old decisions forward, never seeing that they are running out of steam. Steve writes in his Moore's Law Is Crap post:
Is our industry ever going to get out of this amazing backwater of a gridlock, this evolutionary dead-end we're in, where we programmers act like army ants, churning out loops and SOAP calls and UML diagrams as if we're weaving cloth with the very fabric of the computational universe?
And so many of us think things are the way they are because that's the way they must be. We never realize how much of our tools and our outlook on the types of problems we can solve are deeply affected by the decisions made along ago. If we'd have zagged instead of zigged, certain problems would be much easier and others, much harder. And that's not to say that's we should have zagged, but we need to acknowledge it. We need to realize that we can build and learn to use radically better tools, tools that are well known and commonplace in a parallel universe, but look completely foreign in ours. And it's just because we zigged, that's all.
Of course, it's not as easy as just creating a new technology, new tools. You have to understand the people that will use them, you must understand what it is they know and how you can use their existing knowledge to make the transition to new concepts, technology, idioms, whatever, easier. You pick metaphors that people will understand. You use terminology and idioms that people already know, are already used to, and try to bridge the cognitive gap of what they need to learn and make it as painless as possible. If you've ever created something as fundamental as a programming language, you'll understand the awesome power you hold, and how easy it is to make something completely incomprehensible and unusable for people who aren't you.
Anyway, I like to read Steve's blog. You should read it too.
Posted March 24, 2006 12:46 PM
Comments
Holy Wow, but that blog doesn't have an original thought in its brain. I've seen little bits of those rants in other places... it is like he just found stuff he liked, copied it all together, and wrote a rant to act as the glue. He even repeats his own paragraphs multiple times in the same entry. Oh, you repeated it above as well, didn't you.
Wow. Even blogs are degenerating into nothing but cool sound bites.
In any case, read a few more entries down, and he mentions three different times how he just finished some book that inspired him, as he proceeds to regurgitate the concepts from the book in rant form.
Entertaining? Absolutely. And even thought-provoking.
But don't fool yourself -- he is just re-processing all the ideas from his reading, not really showing any true understanding of his own. Of course, that is 95% of the blogging world anyway, so why worry?
Dave, March 24, 2006 2:56 PM
"But don't fool yourself -- he is just re-processing all the ideas from his reading, not really showing any true understanding of his own."
Because he writes about something he (gasp) learned, his writing is bad? How would one, besides writing intelligently about a subject, show true understanding?
The DRY principle only applys to code, not to writings. And when you see the same mistakes over and over again, you need to point it out again and again. People don't want to read some dusty old paper from 40 years ago. We need to hear the message in the current context, to show the problems are still relevent. And ideally, you'd make it entertaining. You may not see the value in it, but I do, and so do others.
Damien, March 24, 2006 3:27 PM
Oh and BTW Dave, you criticism of Steve sounds a lot like my early criticism of Joel Spolsky. I thought he was getting credit for inventing things he was only regurgitating, but I got over it. After a while I realized that because he's such a great writer, the same rational messages we'd heard for years were reaching more people. That's a very good thing.
Damien, March 24, 2006 3:32 PM
Hmm. Yes, you have a point - good ideas getting more mileage is a good thing.
Dave, March 24, 2006 4:59 PM
Sometimes I need to hear the same answer five different ways before I truly get it. Yegge's good at spinning things in just a unique enough way that I get a some new perspective on things. That's a real talent. I agree it's a great blog and he's a very good writer.
Pete Lyons, March 24, 2006 10:24 PM
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