Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

I was thinking about this sort of thing a few weeks ago. I think it's more about 'control' rather than 'safety'.

Heres my take:

fiscally conservative politician = tight control on spending

fiscally liberal politician = loose control on spending (just throw money at whatever, who cares)

fiscally conservative programmer = tight control over code (refactoring, design patterns, documentation, tests)

fiscally liberal programmer = loose control over code (who cares if it's spaghetti code, as long as it runs)

socially conservative politician = tight control over people (no abortions/gay marriage/legal weed for anyone)

socially liberal politician = loose control over people (let people do what they want)

socially conservative programmer = tight control over people (heavy process, waterfall)

socially liberal programmer = loose control over people (light process, agile, "just write good software")

I'm a socially liberal, fiscally conservative programmer. At my last job everyone was fiscally liberal and socially conservative. I did not last long at that job.

Honestly, I can't see it that way. People that I met and I know how they work and think don't fit in this axis at all. The distinction that I do see is between people that trusts experience of what works and what doesn't (and still willing to test new ideas when it makes sense) and people that rigidly adheres to policies or dogmas.

The type of tools they use and like are circumstantial. It's more of a empiricists vs. authority thing.

In the examples given, Dart with its optional type system (and with type-checking that only triggers warnings) would actually fall in the liberal camp.

     You can bet that the Mars Curiosity rover isn't 
     using a garbage collected dynamic language

It's using 2.5 million lines of C. C is not a strongly typed language. C can't really be classified as dynamic or static. C is just low-level assembly with some structure attached.

     I don't think that Tim Sweeney or John Carmack 
     are prematurely optimizing ...

These people's jobs are building engines, not games. If you want to build a game, especially if you don't have their resources and knowledge, you're far better off by starting with friendlier tools, such as PyGame.

It's much cheaper to validate your idea that way and in the process you might end up with a hit like Angry Birds, which runs in the browser just fine.

So, this is the culmination of 8 years of rants and blog posts? This is what he's been trying to say all that time? What a peak he has reached. What an insight.

I'm trying to think of an apt analogy for this post that doesn't involve vomit or defecation, but it's hard. From the introduction proclaiming how readers will be stunned by how clearly and resoundingly true the revelation revealed within will be, to the literary diarrhea it's followed by... it's like a little kid proudly telling his parents he finally used the toilet properly only for them to find he completely missed the bowl. Yeah, I failed.

If the political spectrum is deeply flawed, as he said, then why even try to hack it onto something completely unrelated, made of individual technical points where each programmer may have a different approach?

I don't know, I like a lot of his past posts, but I don't dig this one. I don't think it provides any useful insight whatsoever.

     I would probably place C# as significantly more 
     "liberal" than Java

Only if you look at these languages in isolation from their virtual machines and operating systems on top of which they run, also disregarding the communities around them.

Java as a language is more conservative, definitely, but the Java ecosystem is definitely more liberal. As proof, compare Java's open-source community with .NET. Or compare the maturity of alternative JVM languages (e.g. Scala, Clojure, JRuby), with the alternatives running on top of .NET ; or compare the web frameworks available for each.

This is the reason why, when faced with a choice, a "liberal" developer will most likely pick Java over C#, even if C# as a language is more liberal.

     Only very brave--very liberal--companies are going to 
     use Haskell or Scheme in actual production

I do not think this is an issue of liberals versus conservatives. It's actually an issue of pragmatism versus idealism.

I'm pretty sure that many people wanted to use Haskell or Scheme in production, but then they'd shoot themselves in the foot, because the available libraries and tools for a language are far, far more important than the language itself. That's why Perl was so successful in the first place, because Perl hackers were getting shit done, then contributing to CPAN, which allowed other hackers to get their own shit done, and so on.

On the other hand I'm seeing lots of startups trying out and even using Clojure and Scala in production, at least for parts of the project. That's because these languages have all the Java libraries at their disposal, even if the languages themselves are still immature.

Don't mistake pragmatism for conservatism. That would be a mistake.