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Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

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Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#61

I'm trying to think of what anti-macros Clojure talk by a "key presenter" he might be referring to. I'm only familiar with the talks from Clojure/conj, so the only one that I can think of is Christophe Grand's (not= DSLs macros) talk from 2010[1]. If so, I think his summary mischaracterizes the content of that talk, but it could be another talk he's thinking of. [1] http://blip.tv/clojure/christophe-grand-not-dsl-mac…

I'm fairly certain that's the one he's talking about. Having watched it live and on video, its message is not as dire as it's often made out to be. Regardless, it touches on a point of pride for Lisp programmers and as a result is viewed in a negative light by some. I offered a mild rebuttal at the following Conj called "The Macronomicon" (http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-macronomicon-597023...).

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#62
post #4

As Yegge mentioned in his post, this is a bit of an oversimplification. As a simple illustration, choosing a statically typed language like Java over Python is certainly a conservative trait. But then choosing Python over Haskell is exactly the same, just with the whole difference translated towards the liberal end of the spectrum. Put another way, it's the political liberals who came up with OSHA (I hope--I'm somewh…

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…

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Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#63
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mat…

How much of the difference between the C# and Java ecosystems is due to the age of the language? Of course, I agree with you, too, because we have a "liberal" language (C#) tied to an extremely "conservative" company/platform (Microsoft), and that will always be a limiting factor in the growth of the ecosystem.

Java is just fundamentally more Linux-world friendly, which meshes with the free and open source world.

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems very subjective (and somewhat arbitrary) to assign labels of "conservative" or "liberal" to languages based largely on type safety. If this random blog post is taken as the definitive source of "conservative" vs "liberal" we get the following: Twitter and Tumblr using Scala are "Hardcore conservative", while guys writing assembler for IBM mainframes are "Batshit liberal" ?

Assembler is so liberal that you have to be deeply conservative in order to write code for it.

Exactly! I think assembly language falls through the cracks in this way of classification - languages themselves can be liberal/conservative, and the communities using them can be liberal/conservative. In the majority of cases, these two will be aligned. But in assembly code, there are a lot of different ways to screw things up (batshit liberal purely based on the risk profile of the language), so if you want code that works, you need to be extremely risk averse (conservative) from the outset.

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#68
post #4

As Yegge mentioned in his post, this is a bit of an oversimplification. As a simple illustration, choosing a statically typed language like Java over Python is certainly a conservative trait. But then choosing Python over Haskell is exactly the same, just with the whole difference translated towards the liberal end of the spectrum. Put another way, it's the political liberals who came up with OSHA (I hope--I'm somewh…

> Put another way, it's the political liberals who came up with OSHA (I hope--I'm somewhat ignorant of the actual history :P).

OSHA, like the EPA, was started under/by Nixon.

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#69
I tend to relate to conservative with "small government", and in that light Lua would be a conservative language, because it has a small core and doesn't try to do too much.

His conservative definition is seems to be "everything that is wrong with the world" or something.

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Also, this older rant reads to me as Yegge saying that this "conservative guy" was responsible for Google's success:

"I've been debating whether to say this, since it'll smack vaguely of obsequiousness, but I've realized that one of the Google seed engineers (exactly one) is almost singlehandedly responsible for the amazing quality of Google's engineering culture. And I mean both in the sense of having established it, and also in the sense of keeping the wheel spinning. I won't name the person, and for the record he almost certainly loathes me, for reasons that are my own damn fault. But I'd hire him in a heartbeat: more evidence, I think, that the Done, and Gets Things Smart folks aren't necessarily your friends. They're just people you're lucky enough to have worked with.

At first it's entirely non-obvious who's responsible for Google's culture of engineering discipline: the design docs, audited code reviews, early design reviews, readability reviews, resisting introduction of new languages, unit testing and code coverage, profiling and performance testing, etc. You know. The whole gamut of processes and tools that quality engineering organizations use to ensure that code is open, readable, documented, and generally non-shoddy work.

But if you keep an eye on the emails that go out to Google's engineering staff, over time a pattern emerges: there's one superheroic dude who's keeping us all in line."

(http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.br/2008/06/done-and-gets-thi...)

Re: Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

#70
In his section on Tech Corporations, he classifies Apple as "Diagnosis: no idea."

Is there a reason nobody speaks publicly about Apple's engineering culture? We hear a lot about the culture at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. But I've never met an Apple engineer. And I've never read any detailed accounts by an insider.

Does anybody have any good resources? Or is there a very restrictive confidentiality policy?

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