5 ms·

To help someone move up the hierarchies, they have to have an intrisic (sic) desire to do so. Arguments like “but it works” or “it gets the job done” are

by Udo 14y ago

To help someone move up the hierarchies, they have to have an intrisic (sic) desire to do so. Arguments like “but it works” or “it gets the job done” are tell-tell signs of someone happy at the lowest level of the technical hierarchy and your cue to just quietly back out of the debate. For an article that claims we need software "in all shapes and sizes" the amount of smug superiority exhibited here is amazing. Yes, different people have different priorities when it comes to software choice, but applying an arbitrary one-dimensional quality pyramid to it and assigning users to levels corresponding from 'absolutely clueless hillbilly' to 'latte-sipping Ruby poet' is just wrong. And the pyramid itself doesn't follow any logical ordering either. E.g. the implication that "beautiful code" is also fault tolerant is a total non sequitur. We get it, 37signals is moving the industry forward, it says so right in the infographic. I'm not even disagreeing with the fact that this company has been extremely influential, and I did enjoy reading their book - but appointing yourself king of the hill while casually dismissing technology you don't agree with as being lower level, that's just bad form.

skrish 14y ago
Reading his response to a comment in his blog changes the context of his perceived smugness. Doesn't it? Here is what I am referring to: =========== DHH 10 Jul 12 Kathy, that’s a great point. Also, this pyramid can be applied in finer resolution within your stack. For example, I’m perfectly content to be at the “Well engineered” level when it comes to my use of MySQL, but when it comes to Ruby and Rails, I want to be at “Moving industry forward”. ===========
- paulsutter 14y ago
  Changes the context of his smugness? Yeah as in erasing all doubt that the author is not merely smug but full on delusional. Elon Musk is moving industries forward. The first time I used an iPhone it was so beautiful I could cry. But, Rails? I mean, not to harsh on Rails at all, it's a great tool. Moving an industry forward whenever you use Rails? WTF?
  - joshuacc 14y ago
    I highly doubt he's talking about moving industries forward by using Rails. More likely he means moving industries forward by creating and continuing development of Rails. Say what you want about it now, Rails had a huge impact on the web development industry when it first came out.
    - paulsutter 14y ago
      Thanks for the correction, doesn't change my reaction. Languages are great, but its hard to tell If the proliferation of so many languages moves the industry forward or backward. Wasn't the whole point of the tower of babel story that god created so many languages to slow down progress?
zithtar 14y ago
It's DHH, did you really expect anything other than smug superiority?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
raganwald 14y ago
It’s close enough to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to work for me. I’m more concerned with whether the general idea adds some value to my thinking than trying to take them down a peg for any perceived smugness. And speaking as an ex-salesperson, this general model is extremely relevant when attempting to persuade someone to change. Within the narrow confine of a single decision, different people are at different places in a hierarchy like this, and you are wasting your time if you argue at the wrong level. It’s important to remember that placement in the hierarchy with respect to a specific choice is not a value judgment about a human being. I spend a lot of time daydreaming about programming languages, but when there’s a plumbing problem in my house I just want it fixed. Someone might be a latte-sipping derivatives poet but happy to hack together some Perl to process some data feeds. It’s up to you of course, but I find I get a lot less out of essays I read if I get sidetracked into making value judgments about the authors. If there’s something there worth thinking about, why let the other stuff distract you?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- smacktoward 14y ago
  I find I get a lot less out of essays I read if I get sidetracked into making value judgments about the authors Similarly, I find I get a lot less out of essays when it seems that the authors are making value judgments about me.
  - raganwald 14y ago
    Again you inject the authors into the discussion. Why don’t we pretend I have this warehouse full of monkeys tapping on typewriters. We walk by one of the monkeys and look at what it has written. Hmm, seems interesting. It could be all wrong, it could be useful. Why can’t we just just examine the words on the paper for what they are and see if they're useful to think about? If you’d rather not, you go your way and I will go mine.
frankc 14y ago
The irony of the whole thing is that it is usually the pragmatists and not the idealists who wind up "moving industry forward", because by definition, the pragmatists get things done. The world needs C not lisp.
- groby_b 14y ago
  And yet the ideas of Lisp are what's driving modern languages forward. The world needs both. The world needs people actually getting relevant stuff done right now, and the world needs the dreamers who focus on Utopia. Ideally, both learn from each others' experiences, without declaring that really, they are the group the world really needs.
- raganwald 14y ago
  I have great sympathy for your point that pragmatism has tremendous value. I disagree in a trifling way with statements like “The world needs C not Lisp,” it is obvious to me that the world needs both C and Lisp. Or it did, and both have contributed in various ways to progress, and C continues to be a useful tool. The interesting thing is that insanely great progress requires operating at all levels of the hierarchy. Consider the oft-quoted maxim, “Real artists ship.” This does not suggest that there is no room for dreaming, but rather that the highest form of artistry is the application of pragmatism to manifesting our dreams.
  - tom_b 14y ago
    "the highest form of artistry is the application of pragmatism to manifesting our dreams" Have been sitting on that sentence just waiting to use it or are you feeling particularly poetic today? Thanks either way. Very nicely phrased.
  - frankc 14y ago
    First of all, I think my statement "the world needs C not Lisp" was meant to be taken metaphorically, not literally. Of course there is a place for Lisp, but at the end of the day, who has gotten more done in the real world? That certainly hasn't stopped the Lisp hackers from looking down their noses, however. The bottom line is that the sense I get from the kinds of rhetoric in the OP is not the kind of high-minded idealism you express but rather just a bunch of software aestheticians casting value judgements on the people who are focused on making things happen. My perception could be wrong, I'll grant you that.
msie 14y ago
Yeah, this article is distracting to me. I'm trying to get things done, but I feel guilty that I'm not "doing it right".
timwiseman 14y ago
I think you may be reading this article far more harshly than I was. For one, I do not think the person sitting at "sorta works" is necessarily a 'clueless hillbilly'. In fact, I suspect most serious developers travel up and down this pyramid all the time. Sometimes they are trying to push the state of the art forward, sometimes something that "sorta works" and ships ontime is just fine. As for "beautiful code" being fault tolerant, it could be argued that any code which is not fault tolerant is not beautiful. I am not sure if that is right or now, but beauty tends to be somewhat subjective and that seems a valid interpretation.
- alberich 14y ago
  I see tow problems with this. First, the fact that "beautiful" is very subjective... what makes code beautiful? Is it the idea expressed, the syntax, the cleverness? Second, the fact that this subjective property could imply that something is fault tolerant, without being clear of what you mean by fault tolerance. This being a very large research area requires one to be precise of what one is talking about, before saying that you solve the problem by writing "beautiful" code.
ken 14y ago
Scott McCloud's book "Understanding Comics" outlines a path of 6 steps for artists. He proposes that the greats all master the same first 4 steps, but then split on which of the final two is their primary tool. The "pioneers and revolutionaries" play with the form itself (Moebius, Picasso, Stravinsky). The "storytellers" use the medium for their ideas (Schultz, Dickens, Capra). Neither approach is superior to the other, and the line between them is certainly fuzzy. The original Macintosh operating system, for example, was probably pretty lousy code by any modern standard, but certainly moved the industry forward. TeX, on the other hand, is arguably excellent code, and still used today, but probably never had as many users. Which is "better"? Neither, of course! In McCloud's terms, Apple focused on "form", and Knuth focused on "idea".

by Udo 14y ago

skrish 14y ago

Reading his response to a comment in his blog changes the context of his perceived smugness. Doesn't it? Here is what I am referring to: =========== DHH 10 Jul 12 Kathy, that’s a great point. Also, this pyramid can be applied in finer resolution within your stack. For example, I’m perfectly content to be at the “Well engineered” level when it comes to my use of MySQL, but when it comes to Ruby and Rails, I want to be at “Moving industry forward”. ===========

paulsutter 14y ago
Changes the context of his smugness? Yeah as in erasing all doubt that the author is not merely smug but full on delusional. Elon Musk is moving industries forward. The first time I used an iPhone it was so beautiful I could cry. But, Rails? I mean, not to harsh on Rails at all, it's a great tool. Moving an industry forward whenever you use Rails? WTF?
- joshuacc 14y ago
  I highly doubt he's talking about moving industries forward by using Rails. More likely he means moving industries forward by creating and continuing development of Rails. Say what you want about it now, Rails had a huge impact on the web development industry when it first came out.
  - paulsutter 14y ago
    Thanks for the correction, doesn't change my reaction. Languages are great, but its hard to tell If the proliferation of so many languages moves the industry forward or backward. Wasn't the whole point of the tower of babel story that god created so many languages to slow down progress?

zithtar 14y ago

It's DHH, did you really expect anything other than smug superiority?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

raganwald 14y ago

It’s close enough to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to work for me. I’m more concerned with whether the general idea adds some value to my thinking than trying to take them down a peg for any perceived smugness. And speaking as an ex-salesperson, this general model is extremely relevant when attempting to persuade someone to change. Within the narrow confine of a single decision, different people are at different places in a hierarchy like this, and you are wasting your time if you argue at the wrong level. It’s important to remember that placement in the hierarchy with respect to a specific choice is not a value judgment about a human being. I spend a lot of time daydreaming about programming languages, but when there’s a plumbing problem in my house I just want it fixed. Someone might be a latte-sipping derivatives poet but happy to hack together some Perl to process some data feeds. It’s up to you of course, but I find I get a lot less out of essays I read if I get sidetracked into making value judgments about the authors. If there’s something there worth thinking about, why let the other stuff distract you?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
smacktoward 14y ago
I find I get a lot less out of essays I read if I get sidetracked into making value judgments about the authors Similarly, I find I get a lot less out of essays when it seems that the authors are making value judgments about me.
- raganwald 14y ago
  Again you inject the authors into the discussion. Why don’t we pretend I have this warehouse full of monkeys tapping on typewriters. We walk by one of the monkeys and look at what it has written. Hmm, seems interesting. It could be all wrong, it could be useful. Why can’t we just just examine the words on the paper for what they are and see if they're useful to think about? If you’d rather not, you go your way and I will go mine.

frankc 14y ago

The irony of the whole thing is that it is usually the pragmatists and not the idealists who wind up "moving industry forward", because by definition, the pragmatists get things done. The world needs C not lisp.

groby_b 14y ago
And yet the ideas of Lisp are what's driving modern languages forward. The world needs both. The world needs people actually getting relevant stuff done right now, and the world needs the dreamers who focus on Utopia. Ideally, both learn from each others' experiences, without declaring that really, they are the group the world really needs.
raganwald 14y ago
I have great sympathy for your point that pragmatism has tremendous value. I disagree in a trifling way with statements like “The world needs C not Lisp,” it is obvious to me that the world needs both C and Lisp. Or it did, and both have contributed in various ways to progress, and C continues to be a useful tool. The interesting thing is that insanely great progress requires operating at all levels of the hierarchy. Consider the oft-quoted maxim, “Real artists ship.” This does not suggest that there is no room for dreaming, but rather that the highest form of artistry is the application of pragmatism to manifesting our dreams.
- tom_b 14y ago
  "the highest form of artistry is the application of pragmatism to manifesting our dreams" Have been sitting on that sentence just waiting to use it or are you feeling particularly poetic today? Thanks either way. Very nicely phrased.
- frankc 14y ago
  First of all, I think my statement "the world needs C not Lisp" was meant to be taken metaphorically, not literally. Of course there is a place for Lisp, but at the end of the day, who has gotten more done in the real world? That certainly hasn't stopped the Lisp hackers from looking down their noses, however. The bottom line is that the sense I get from the kinds of rhetoric in the OP is not the kind of high-minded idealism you express but rather just a bunch of software aestheticians casting value judgements on the people who are focused on making things happen. My perception could be wrong, I'll grant you that.

msie 14y ago

Yeah, this article is distracting to me. I'm trying to get things done, but I feel guilty that I'm not "doing it right".

timwiseman 14y ago

I think you may be reading this article far more harshly than I was. For one, I do not think the person sitting at "sorta works" is necessarily a 'clueless hillbilly'. In fact, I suspect most serious developers travel up and down this pyramid all the time. Sometimes they are trying to push the state of the art forward, sometimes something that "sorta works" and ships ontime is just fine. As for "beautiful code" being fault tolerant, it could be argued that any code which is not fault tolerant is not beautiful. I am not sure if that is right or now, but beauty tends to be somewhat subjective and that seems a valid interpretation.

alberich 14y ago
I see tow problems with this. First, the fact that "beautiful" is very subjective... what makes code beautiful? Is it the idea expressed, the syntax, the cleverness? Second, the fact that this subjective property could imply that something is fault tolerant, without being clear of what you mean by fault tolerance. This being a very large research area requires one to be precise of what one is talking about, before saying that you solve the problem by writing "beautiful" code.

ken 14y ago

Scott McCloud's book "Understanding Comics" outlines a path of 6 steps for artists. He proposes that the greats all master the same first 4 steps, but then split on which of the final two is their primary tool. The "pioneers and revolutionaries" play with the form itself (Moebius, Picasso, Stravinsky). The "storytellers" use the medium for their ideas (Schultz, Dickens, Capra). Neither approach is superior to the other, and the line between them is certainly fuzzy. The original Macintosh operating system, for example, was probably pretty lousy code by any modern standard, but certainly moved the industry forward. TeX, on the other hand, is arguably excellent code, and still used today, but probably never had as many users. Which is "better"? Neither, of course! In McCloud's terms, Apple focused on "form", and Knuth focused on "idea".