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Your last paragraph is interesting. When I think back about at Perl, Python, and Ruby, all of them have/had charismatic leaders -- Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum
by throwaway2037 2y ago
Your last paragraph is interesting. When I think back about at Perl, Python, and Ruby, all of them have/had charismatic leaders -- Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, and Yukihiro Matsumoto. This would help to explain part of the success of their programming languages. My guess: All three of them have high IQ and EQ. To be clear: I don't write this post to take anything away from the incredible accomplishments of those people. Rather, I am trying to say that having a good personality (and probably higher EQ) only helped their cause.
- azernik 2y agoI would even argue that Linus Torvalds's famous abrasiveness is its own kind of charisma, well adapted to its target audience.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoOh, absolutely. Linux kernel hacking is a _dojo_ at least as much as it is a service to one's fellow man. You don't want to go to the gym with a bunch of wimps who are cheating on their curls, and you don't want to hack on the kennel all day when 90% of the people around you are more interesting in talking around the thing than in actually improving it, and improving their own skills in the process. Linus's approach is very good at setting this precedent, while staying really quite friendly, and it's what attracts a lot of people to the endeavor.
- tqi 2y agoI think what this article misses is that for most real-world problems, there is a) not an objectively "right" or "best" solution (just varying degrees of partial solutions that are imperfect in different ways), and b) there are reasons to coalesce around a single solution. So it seems perfectly reasonable to me that individuals who are able to be "the most socially adept and organized manager" could rally a community around their solution.