51–60 of 186 posts
Didn't we know that already?
I would like to believe that the political bit was just a well timed hook to get people to read his blog. He understands that the right incendiary rant will bring readers. If it is sincere, though, it shows a disturbing level of crankiness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 attach…
1. Dart is less liberal than JS. For example, it is early bound. This fact alone allows the IDEs to do a much better job with less complexity. As I mentioned, Carmack and Sweeney make engines, the artist interface is UnrealScript, or Lua, etc. But that's besides the point: performance matters. Carmack isn't trying to build yet another Box2D casual game (the Iphone Angry Birds uses a C implementation of Box2D, and Lua…
C is statically and weakly typed language. That doesn't make it dynamic in the same sense as python or ruby, but it does make it a heck of a lot less safe, a heck of a lot more flexible, and thus a lot more liberal.
His real argument is that there is a dynamic typing vs static typing divide. Didn't we know that already? I would like to believe that the political bit was just a well timed hook to get people to read his blog. He understands that the right incendiary rant will bring readers. If it is sincere, though, it shows a disturbing level of crankiness.
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.…
Anyway I'm not sure were to put myself on this axis. My behavior changes depending on other variables(what consequences would bug have/how many times code is going to be executed etc).
FE: critical part of commercial software (like money calculation) would be written in a way that would try to make it obvious that there are no errors, in language with type checking with unit tests and if possible even with mathematical proof of correctness. With code review and QA thrown at it afterwards. To sum up very conservative(and costly) approach.
On the other hand my holiday photos got completely different treatment. Short python script, that would batch their HDR process in a way specific for their content and with a lot of dependencies to my current desktop setup, without any unit tests(script thrown up few temporary files making it easy for manual debug, had backup of my photos in case script ate them). The only conservative thing that I could think of in this setup was that I made it concurrent to use 4 cores because it was only one line change and 4time speed up in lengthy process was worth it.
Can someone suggest were on liberal-conservative axis am I?
For example of what's pretty close to a Yegge rant of the 1980's, see Edsger Dijkstra, "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science" [1]. It seems to be bemoaning similar debates in the software field, though from a very "conservative" perspective, since Dijkstra prefers that a formal proof should be required with every program, and one should completely avoid anthropomorphism in discussing software design.
Another thought that's crossed my mind: one of the reasons for the evolution of these approaches to politics and risk over the years has to do with the scale of impact. Liberally messing around with a social and economic systems can lead to widespread human disaster: China's Great Leap Forward comes to mind. How the software is used and how reliable it needs to be is an engineering tradeoff with regards to cost & time. This is often why you tend to see much more liberal approaches to software in smaller companies - the scale of impact is much smaller (in terms of customer base, and investment) when you cock up.
Now, it's clear that larger companies, particularly many IT shops, could learn a thing or two about being "progressive conservatives", as they've "conserved" for far too long and are caught in the trap of special interests (i.e. traditional vendors dependent on their cash). Fear of dynamic languages, open source, or cloud services, or non-waterfall development is mostly a reactionary ideology grounded with some kernels of truth - static typing DOES help codebases scale (but you shouldn't be proud of a large codebase), you can't just pick ANY open source library as some are DOA, or ANY cloud as some are unreliable, and tinkering with your delivery methodology can reduce your performance greatly due to confusion, plus there's plenty of cargo-cult agile consultants waiting to rope you in. So, you need to think these things through. But that's not an excuse for avoidance. Perhaps that means I'm a software moderate.
[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036...
(edit: typo)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might be because of the Scala community, as he feels it is with Clojure.
Tumblr and Twitter don't strike me as a particularly conservative audience. Quite the opposite.
The "software liberal" companies he lists - Facebook and Amazon - both make heavy use of C++ (a "moderate-conservative" language to Yegge) and Amazon also uses Java heavily (another "moderate conservative" language.
Off-topic but does Google Plus offer any way to view a post nearly full-screen, without all the extra margin and white space taking up 2/3rds of the screen? A bit annoying that the post text only takes up about 33% of my available screen real estate, even on the "view single post" URL: http://cl.ly/image/1p1B2o3D262g
Broad-brush talk is a step backwards. Political talk and thinking is poisoned by the ideas of "left" and "right" even though those phrases haven't had a connection to reality since the French First Republic. It'll probably be fine. Politics is in many respects a zero-sum game, and polarises participants into two camps. Software isn't like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the wikipedia[1]: "Congress established the agency under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which President Richard M. Nixon signed into law on December 29, 1970." Nixon[2] also tried to get Universal Health Care for all low-income and employed Americans, but it was blocked by Senator Edward Kennedy and other Democrats. Maybe politics[3] is just the art of getting the state to delegate property rights, even…
Nixon was a Pre-Reagan Establishment Conservative. Such Republicans are not tolerated by the modern GOP, as Nixon's record regarding OSHA, the EPA (which he also created), and Universal Health Care will demonstrate. Political parties evolve over time, sometimes quite drastically, as the political makeup of the country as a whole shifts and changes.
If that happens, I predict a fucking hellhole and I can only imagine myself leaving the industry at once.