Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

I couldn't agree more. I shudder to think of a near future in which discussions include this "libral" or "conservative". I don't think it is nonsense because I think "it's a bad dichotomy for politics." I think it is bad because it is a poorly formed idea that reminds me of a high schooler learning some new thing and trying to apply it all over the place and see it everywhere like a psychoanalyst.

But the worst part about this is it is a pretty useless discussion despite the claims that this is some revolutionary culmination of a series of wildly over blog posts.

>It boils down to cost vs benefit, actual studies, and mathematical axioms, not aesthetics or feelings.

Its not quite that simple. Well performed studies that are actually relevant to a particular project are _difficult_ to come by. By well performed, I mean free of biases and misattributions and relevant to your particular use case. For example, most of the links in the answers here (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/10032/dynamic...), a question specifically requesting studies them don't have any significant empirical data. Further, if you dig deeper its also clear that studies often contradict each other. Further, lets say you try to do a cost-benefit analysis. How? Try to estimate how many hours a particular technique will save you and you run into the same problem people have been trying to deal with for years. Estimating the time it takes to do a project is _hard_. Add to that how rapidly things are changing in this space and how dependent the structure of code is on the application of that code, and its clear that we really don't have objective metrics for this kind of thing.

>Engineering tools affect both how you ship, what you can ship, and when you can ship it. The choice isn't arbitrary, and choosing involves careful reasoned thought, informed by real experience

This is far more revealing of how these decisions are actually made. Your experience and thought process may very well be arbitrary when contrasted with real data. It might as well be aesthetics and fuzzy feeling.

Great and obvious, but is this really new?

I think the issue he captures has been well known for a while. It is structured versus unstructured. Neither is better in an absolute sense, but one method can be better than another in a given situation. This is beyond just software, but business approaches in general. Startups are generally liberal/unstructured, Dow Jones firms are generally conservative/structured.

He right about it being political, and about there being different contexts. The liberal & conservative labels unfortunately misframe the discussion in to a political context, and a bi-partisan one. Worse, he did it in the midst of election fever (gee, you think that is a coincidence?).

Basically, you can write off intelligent discourse for the next few months, but this too shall pass.

Yegge's entire essay seems like an application of JWZ's regex admonition. "I know, I'll present my hypothesis using political terminology!" Now you have two problems.

Political terminology in the United States is MASSIVELY warped by entities who spend literally millions of dollars in an effort to connotatively redefine words. When you (re)define words like "conservative" or "liberal" you risk alienating people who have been conditioned to have an emotional response to either definition. If you define a term in a way that seems pejorative to your reader, the reader will weight every subsequent statement against the rigor they think you brought (or did not bring) to those definitions. Your essay will entirely fail to persuade if it rests on (perceived) faulty definitions.

When writing to a largely US audience, no attempt at honest communication will be aided by the application of political labels.

Here's a test: can the essay be rewritten without that political terminology? Reader "nirvana" used the terms "cowboy" and "architect" to describe his two axes. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4367328 ) I very much prefer those terms. Yes, they're also connotative and subjective, but as analogies they map much better onto the subject being discussed.