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The Parley Letter

david.heinemeierhansson.com

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Re: The Parley Letter

#41

Post by regularfry »

aGHz wrote: post #12

1970: " Another part of the necessary art of calling bullshit is to take down good ideas when they become inflated beyond what they can bear. Organizing your instructions in a clear way is a reasonable idea that I support. But there's just not enough there there to dress it up in function calls, machine optimization, and all the other -- here's that word again! -- wankery that passes for muster in the compilers ortho…

> Now, I understand this particular guy is deeply invested in the MVC architecture. But that doesn't mean history stops here.

DHH himself has said that Rails MVC is not classical MVC. I don't know if Rails was the first framework to use this particular definition of MVC, but drawing a line between 1980's MVC and Rails is tenuous at best. Making a historical argument on this basis just doesn't hold up.

Re: The Parley Letter

#42

Post by three14 »

wpietri wrote: post #35
aGHz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, you've repeated that several times. "Without meaningful practical benefit" is what I'm referring to when I say you keep stating that you're missing the point. Just because you happen to not see the meaningful practical benefit doesn't mean there isn't one.

That is one of the most common young nerd mistakes. "If I don't see the value in something, the people doing it must be idiots!" Rather than, say, "... I must not understand something here." I made it a ton as a youth. I had to have about a thousand, "Oh, now I see what they're talking about" moments before I learned to keep my mouth shut long enough to actually learn something.

Agreed, but there has to be some filter. You can't just say, "I don't see the value in crystal healing, I must not understand something here." Sometimes, you do understand enough.

Re: The Parley Letter

#43

Post by smoyer »

aGHz wrote: post #12

1970: " Another part of the necessary art of calling bullshit is to take down good ideas when they become inflated beyond what they can bear. Organizing your instructions in a clear way is a reasonable idea that I support. But there's just not enough there there to dress it up in function calls, machine optimization, and all the other -- here's that word again! -- wankery that passes for muster in the compilers ortho…

Or the hatred of other languages and frameworks? JEE (or J2EE as it is called in the article was truly both bloated and difficult to configure before adopting the "convention over configuration" ideal. But it's a very pleasant way to develop applications now.

Re: The Parley Letter

#44

Post by wpietri »

rhizome wrote: post #39
wpietri wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. He is criticizing based on consequence, which is the generation of pointless flame wars.

Presumed effect is merely fortune-telling. Xentronium said nothing about the java and rspec arguments themselves, just that something was said with what they think is an undiplomatic tone.

The notion that you cannot criticize somebody for the probable consequences of their actions is idiocy. Especially given the track record of DHH-driven flame wars in the past.

He also did say something about those specific arguments: that they were blanket. Which I took to mean: shallow and over-broad.

Re: The Parley Letter

#45

Post by wpietri »

three14 wrote: post #42
wpietri wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is one of the most common young nerd mistakes. "If I don't see the value in something, the people doing it must be idiots!" Rather than, say, "... I must not understand something here." I made it a ton as a youth. I had to have about a thousand, "Oh, now I see what they're talking about" moments before I learned to keep my mouth shut long enough to actually learn something.

Agreed, but there has to be some filter. You can't just say, "I don't see the value in crystal healing, I must not understand something here." Sometimes, you do understand enough.

Well, it depends on how you do it. My original reaction was, "duh, idiocy." But once I paid more attention, I learned a lot about the emotional motivations behind it, the placebo effect, and why western medicine is so unsatisfying to people.

That's helpful, in that you can convince anybody by saying: "Although I have no evidence, I'm sure that crystal healing is bullshit and I'm waaaay smarter than you." All they read from that is contempt and arrogance; that approach to skepticism is basically bullying.

I think a better approach is the one taken by my doctor. When people come in with concerns about vaccines, she first listens to their fears about kids and patiently explains why those particular fears might sound reasonable, but in this case are unwarranted. It's not really about the facts; it's about the hand-holding. For her, the interaction isn't about being right, but about persuading people.

So I agree, but for very high values of "understand enough". It's not enough for me to know that they're wrong; I want to understand why they're wrong sufficiently to have empathy for their situation.

Re: The Parley Letter

#46

Post by wpietri »

aidenn0 wrote: post #33
aGHz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, you've repeated that several times. "Without meaningful practical benefit" is what I'm referring to when I say you keep stating that you're missing the point. Just because you happen to not see the meaningful practical benefit doesn't mean there isn't one.

If I were to buy into everything for which I see no practical benefit, 99% of what I buy into would be crap. By definition I can't tell the difference between snake oil and "stuff that is awesome, but I can't tell it's awesome." Therefore I reject everything for which I cannot see a practical benefit.

There are more states available to you than "buy in" and "reject utterly".

Re: The Parley Letter

#47

Post by three14 »

wpietri wrote: post #45
three14 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but there has to be some filter. You can't just say, "I don't see the value in crystal healing, I must not understand something here." Sometimes, you do understand enough.

Well, it depends on how you do it. My original reaction was, "duh, idiocy." But once I paid more attention, I learned a lot about the emotional motivations behind it, the placebo effect, and why western medicine is so unsatisfying to people. That's helpful, in that you can convince anybody by saying: "Although I have no evidence, I'm sure that crystal healing is bullshit and I'm waaaay smarter than you." All they rea…

So how do you know DHH doesn't meet that threshold? (I don't think it's clear either way, but still "most common young nerd mistakes" is pretty dismissive.)

Re: The Parley Letter

#48

Post by wpietri »

three14 wrote: post #47
wpietri wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it depends on how you do it. My original reaction was, "duh, idiocy." But once I paid more attention, I learned a lot about the emotional motivations behind it, the placebo effect, and why western medicine is so unsatisfying to people. That's helpful, in that you can convince anybody by saying: "Although I have no evidence, I'm sure that crystal healing is bullshit and I'm waaaay smarter than you." All they rea…

So how do you know DHH doesn't meet that threshold? (I don't think it's clear either way, but still "most common young nerd mistakes" is pretty dismissive.)

He might, but he certainly hasn't demonstrated otherwise. In particular, he's not saying, "I see where the REST crowd is going, but their crucial mistake is X." That, combined with DHH's well-earned reputation for arrogance, makes me think he's just doing his usual.

Re: The Parley Letter

#49

Post by mhw »

wpietri wrote: post #37
mhw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I wouldn't let servlets off that easily. One of the basic design choices they made was one request handling function per class (the service method, delegating to doGet/doPost/etc for http requests). As a result, most applications actually needed another framework on top of servlets to do routing based on request URL and mapping on to some model of server side components, like MVC. See for example struts, s…

I certainly don't want to be one to defend Java from criticisms of overengineering. But on this point, I can't blame them much. The Servlet spec was finalized more than 15 years ago, when CGI scripts were the mainstream server-side tech and browsers were circa version 3. The domain "google.com" wasn't registered until 3 months later. I think Servlets were reasonably well done for the time. The web was obviously domin…

Oh, yeah - absolutely. The servlet API was very much of its time, and for several years it seemed to be a good solution. I think it's only in retrospect that it became more clear that there were key challenges that everyone faced in building a web application that the servlet API, and J2EE more broadly, didn't solve. For me that was the thing Rails demonstrated: a full stack solution for building web applications that actually tackled the real problems (like routing requests from URLs to controller methods). And I think the major changes to J2EE since have been in large part a reaction to Rails showing what problems a web framework should actually try to solve.

Re: The Parley Letter

#50

Post by rhizome »

wpietri wrote: post #44
rhizome wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumed effect is merely fortune-telling. Xentronium said nothing about the java and rspec arguments themselves, just that something was said with what they think is an undiplomatic tone.

The notion that you cannot criticize somebody for the probable consequences of their actions is idiocy. Especially given the track record of DHH-driven flame wars in the past. He also did say something about those specific arguments: that they were blanket. Which I took to mean: shallow and over-broad.

To whatever degree flamewars result here, they are historically not flamewars per se, but people arguing over tone. And I'm no statistician, but I would question the GP's probability calculations.

The way to avoid flame wars is not to feed them in anticipation, but to offer a critical beatdown of the arguments at hand, e.g. the higher levels of the PG pyramid.

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