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I'm not sure how to express how happy I am that Steve Yegge is back. He's one of my blogging heroes. One of the few bloggers that I'm planning to reread entirel

by edanm 16y ago

I'm not sure how to express how happy I am that Steve Yegge is back. He's one of my blogging heroes. One of the few bloggers that I'm planning to reread entirely one day, because his writing is just that good. If you've never had the pleasure, don't be put off by the long blog posts. Read them, read them all, they're all amazing. On the length issue: Honestly, Steve's posts were quite long (much like Paul Graham's). To me, it doesn't matter, because every one of them was worth reading all the way through. It sometimes meant I'd have to leave them for later, but I still read them. He mentions that he believed the length might have been a reason people read his posts. I can't speak for anyone else, but if the quality of his writing stays the same, I don't care how long his posts are, I'm reading them. The day he "retired" was truly a sad day for me. By the way, I would happily buy a book of his collected writings (ala Hackers and Painters), so I really wish he would make such a book.

bitsai 16y ago
He's one of my blogging heroes as well. He inspired me to get out of my C/C++/Java comfort zone and embark on a strange and mind-expanding journey through Ruby, Haskell, Scala, culminating in Clojure. When I got to Clojure, I immediately thought, "by golly, this looks like the Lisp Steve Yegge was searching for!" Can't wait to see his thoughts on Clojure.
- thristian 16y ago
  Pretty positive, I expect. From the the end of today's post: > I used to have lot of open, long-standing concerns about the future of programming and productivity, but my sabbatical last year finally brought me some clojure.
whereas 16y ago
On the length issue: Honestly, Steve's posts were quite long (much like Paul Graham's). To me, it doesn't matter, because every one of them was worth reading all the way through. To me, it matters very much: I read Yegge because he dared to be verbose. Good, long reading is increasingly hard to come by in the Twitter age. And I think he had it fairly right with his "impact theory".[1] Most blogging today reads like the textual equivalent of TV infomercials: loud, terse, entertainment-focused, and utterly void of any memorable content, because the author is terrified of "boring the reader". The retention value is virtually nil. Of all the Internet writing I've read, only a handful is memorable: Bjørn Stærk's old blog (before he got brief),[2] Paul Graham's essays,[3] Erik Naggum's Usenet postings[4] and Steve Yegge's actual rants (like this one).[5] They were all long-winded, and confidently so, because they made a basic assumption about the reader: that of reading for enlightenment, not merely entertainment. Steve Yegge, if you are reading this: don't do what the others do. Memorable Internet writing is rare. Memorable Internet writing is very rare indeed. [1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-size-does-matter.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-... [2] http://blog.bearstrong.net/ http://blog.bearstrong.net/ [3] http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html [4] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum) [5] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.ht...

by edanm 16y ago

bitsai 16y ago

He's one of my blogging heroes as well. He inspired me to get out of my C/C++/Java comfort zone and embark on a strange and mind-expanding journey through Ruby, Haskell, Scala, culminating in Clojure. When I got to Clojure, I immediately thought, "by golly, this looks like the Lisp Steve Yegge was searching for!" Can't wait to see his thoughts on Clojure.

thristian 16y ago
Pretty positive, I expect. From the the end of today's post: > I used to have lot of open, long-standing concerns about the future of programming and productivity, but my sabbatical last year finally brought me some clojure.

whereas 16y ago

On the length issue: Honestly, Steve's posts were quite long (much like Paul Graham's). To me, it doesn't matter, because every one of them was worth reading all the way through. To me, it matters very much: I read Yegge because he dared to be verbose. Good, long reading is increasingly hard to come by in the Twitter age. And I think he had it fairly right with his "impact theory".[1] Most blogging today reads like the textual equivalent of TV infomercials: loud, terse, entertainment-focused, and utterly void of any memorable content, because the author is terrified of "boring the reader". The retention value is virtually nil. Of all the Internet writing I've read, only a handful is memorable: Bjørn Stærk's old blog (before he got brief),[2] Paul Graham's essays,[3] Erik Naggum's Usenet postings[4] and Steve Yegge's actual rants (like this one).[5] They were all long-winded, and confidently so, because they made a basic assumption about the reader: that of reading for enlightenment, not merely entertainment. Steve Yegge, if you are reading this: don't do what the others do. Memorable Internet writing is rare. Memorable Internet writing is very rare indeed. [1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-size-does-matter.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-... [2] http://blog.bearstrong.net/ http://blog.bearstrong.net/ [3] http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html [4] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum) [5] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.ht...