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Steve Yegge: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

• deleted 14y ago
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• shiftb 14y ago
  I agree with this. Although, personally I'd make the analogy closer to religion than politics.
• tikhonj 14y ago
  As Yegge mentioned in his post, this is a bit of an oversimplification. As a simple illustration, choosing a statically typed language like Java over Python is certainly a conservative trait. But then choosing Python over Haskell is exactly the same, just with the whole difference translated towards the liberal end of the spectrum. Put another way, it's the political liberals who came up with OSHA (I hope--I'm somewhat ignorant of the actual history :P). A liberal or conservative outlook is not characterized by some particular processes or tools--it's characterized in an entirely relative way. The conservative approach is in choosing the familiar over the novel and in avoiding change. The familiar could be safer--Java vs Python--or it could be less safe--Java vs Haskell. I've talked to some ardent Java adherents, and they have lucid cases for not going over to Python or Ruby or Clojure or what have you. But--critically--these cases are virtually identical to their cases against going over to Haskell or Scala. There are differences in details, of course, but it's a difference in degree rather than kind. Another even more extreme example is TDD. In particular, the arguments people have against adopting TDD are essentially exactly the same as I've seen from TDD supporters against using formal methods. Once again, some details differ, but the core idea seems to remain: some people are inherently wary of change. It's also interesting to note how Yegge categorizes certain concepts in multiple "buckets". Either he's just being inconsistent (which is plausible) or he's making a deeper point: it's not about the particular concept, it's about the philosophy behind it. If he wasn't making that point, I've made it for him :). That is, anything called "something calculus" is conservative, but lambdas (e.g. lambda calculus) aren't. Type-based functions overloading (like type classes, I guess) is conservative, but Scala implicits are liberal. In my view, the languages that are the most conservative (at least in my part of the world) are Java and Python. Why? Simple: they are the default language for almost everyone I know. You're at an enterprisey company? You're probably using Java. You're at a startup? You're probably using Python. You're using C or Scheme or Haskell or Erlang? You're crazy. (I should note that I don't know very many people in systems or embedded programming, so my view is obviously rather biased.) All this rambling (I certainly see why Yegge always writes long posts) has left me with a fairly concise conclusion. Namely, mapping programmer attitudes to a spectrum vaguely inspired by politics is a reasonable idea. Sure, the reality is that there is no total ordering so a one-dimensional representation is fundamentally lacking. However, it's good enough to give some insight. But I would not map technologies there based on the technologies' innate traits. Rather, I would map them there based on the thinking behind the people who use them. This is similar to how--if you don't know the background--it's hard to guess which political party supports which regulation. Gun control is the opposite of liberal, but it's exclusively heralded by liberals; deregulation seems liberal but, of course, isn't. Yet, on other issues, people on either end of the spectrum behave as expected! This is why I think languages like Java and Python are fairly conservative. Not because they try to offer some sort of safety but because they are safe choices. This is also why I would probably place C# as significantly more "liberal" than Java--it may be the most "conservative" .NET language, but it is far less afraid of embracing new ideas than Java. So that end is simple: at least for enterprisey companies and startups, it's populated with Python and Java. But what about the other end? I think this is where the languages that most people consider too crazy to use go. Haskell, Scheme, Erlang and so on. Only very brave--very liberal--companies are going to use Haskell or Scheme in actual production. Too many weird features. Even the sentence "Scheme in production" just sounds weird. So it's not a matter of wanting handrails (Haskell) or not even wearing a helmet (Scheme); rather, it's a matter of being willing to choose something more advanced over something more understood.
  • smashing 14y ago
    From the wikipedia[1]: "Congress established the agency under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which President Richard M. Nixon signed into law on December 29, 1970." Nixon[2] also tried to get Universal Health Care for all low-income and employed Americans, but it was blocked by Senator Edward Kennedy and other Democrats. Maybe politics[3] is just the art of getting the state to delegate property rights, even intellectual property, rather than itself productive pursuit. I postulate[4] that discussions in political spectrum are no more a valuable expenditure of time and resources than painting styles being be a point of reference for programmers. In summary this topic is an "Unknown or expired link" to me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_Safety_and_Health_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_Safety_and_Health... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics [4] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/postulate http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/postulate
    • derleth 14y ago
      Nixon was a Pre-Reagan Establishment Conservative. Such Republicans are not tolerated by the modern GOP, as Nixon's record regarding OSHA, the EPA (which he also created), and Universal Health Care will demonstrate. Political parties evolve over time, sometimes quite drastically, as the political makeup of the country as a whole shifts and changes.
      • jstclair 14y ago
        And it would have been the 91st Congress, which as you can see, had a pretty-substantial Democratic majority: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/91st_United_States_Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/91st_United_States_Congress
    • deleted 14y ago
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    • ralfn 14y ago
      Just because people don't act rationally, that doesn't mean that their emotions are not consistent, or can not be understood. Emotions are not intentional, nor do they lead to rational behavior. (by definition). The translation of an emotion into a point-of-view depends purely on the context: it can swing any direction. A conservative might be against war, because he/she is afraid it will make the world dislike the US more, and hurt his/her security more. A progressive might be in favor of war, because he/she is afraid that without it, the world is worse off, and the potential for a better world is lost. And from that perspective, I do consider the stated 'political' dimension a potentially relevant categorization of programmers' mentality. But without knowing their background, there is no way to predict how they actually feel about specific approaches.
• anarchotroll 14y ago
  What he wrote about Microsoft is completely unrelated to the rest of his post. It says nothing about the company's culture and software development processes. He could have saved himself the embarrassment of writing that.
• cromwellian 14y ago
  before it started I knew it was going to be another typing rant. I think you continue to present a false dichotomy on typing, as well as missing some of the reasons people desire it. In particular, I like typing as machine readable documentation, that makes IDEs simpler and more accurate in code navigation and refactoring. Dart in particular shows this false dichotomy really well, but having a type system for human and machine readable docs, making the IDE experience far more pleasant, but which can be turned on or off. Unsound, untyped, programs can still run. Yes, dynamic languages can have nice IDEs too (Smalltalk), but they are harder to engineer. In terms of optimization, typing is a must for many types of hard real time programming. You can bet that the Mars Curiosity rover isn't using a garbage collected dynamic language. Nor are the inner rendering loops of most mobile games or console games. (Lua is another story when it comes to actual game logic) Lots of bold claims have been made for Javascript JITs for example over the years, include a lot of hype about tracing JITs, but the reality is, Javascript still doesn't even come close to native performance, and it's hideously slow on mobile platforms in comparisons, with basic, idiomatic programming (e.g. dictionaries with fields) having terrible numeric performance. All this has actually served to threaten the Web with a native-takeover because we don't have a fast web language CPU and memory efficient on these devices. I don't think that Tim Sweeney or John Carmack are prematurely optimizing when they decide to write a game engine(rendering) in C++, because experience has taught them that it is highly unlikely they'll be able to optimize a dynamic language implementation later to a satisfactory level. I think many people use a mix of languages depending on the context. I certainly wouldn't write a web service in C++, nor would I write a 3D game in BASIC. I wouldn't use anything but Perl to masage text files, and I'd use R for data analysis.
  • bad_user 14y ago
    In the examples given, Dart with its optional type system (and with type-checking that only triggers warnings) would actually fall in the liberal camp. You can bet that the Mars Curiosity rover isn't using a garbage collected dynamic language It's using 2.5 million lines of C. C is not a strongly typed language. C can't really be classified as dynamic or static. C is just low-level assembly with some structure attached. I don't think that Tim Sweeney or John Carmack are prematurely optimizing ... These people's jobs are building engines, not games. If you want to build a game, especially if you don't have their resources and knowledge, you're far better off by starting with friendlier tools, such as PyGame. It's much cheaper to validate your idea that way and in the process you might end up with a hit like Angry Birds, which runs in the browser just fine.
• ziadbc 14y ago
  Who is more of a 'liberal' programmer, RMS or Linus. Think about it. In my estimation, if the answer here is unclear, then this metaphor breaks hard.
  • pjscott 14y ago
    GNU and Linux both seem to fall into the "conservative" side of Yegge's taxonomy. Do you disagree?
• DanielRibeiro 14y ago
  Interesting positioning of languages: Assembly language: Batshit liberal. Perl, Ruby, PHP, shell-script: Extremist liberal. JavaScript, Visual Basic, Lua: Hardcore liberal. Python, Common Lisp, Smalltalk/Squeak: Liberal. C, Objective-C, Scheme: Moderate-liberal. C++, Java, C#, D, Go: Moderate-conservative. Clojure, Erlang, Pascal: Conservative. Scala, Ada, OCaml, Eiffel: Hardcore conservative. Haskell, SML: Extremist conservative Woud be nice to overlap James Iry's chart[1] with it... [1] from http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2010/05/types-la-chart.html http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2010/05/types-la-chart.html
  • Spearchucker 14y ago
    That list made me smile. The reason it made me smile is that whilst I find myself agreeing with the whole conservative/liberal thing (I despise JavaScript, and yet fall firmly into the Hardcore liberal camp), my mind is still screaming "I'm unique/unclassifiable/obviously an outlier," and had to wonder how much a). my experience and b). my liking for Steve Yegge influences that juxtaposition.
  • thebluesky 14y ago
    It seems very subjective (and somewhat arbitrary) to assign labels of "conservative" or "liberal" to languages based largely on type safety. If this random blog post is taken as the definitive source of "conservative" vs "liberal" we get the following: Twitter and Tumblr using Scala are "Hardcore conservative", while guys writing assembler for IBM mainframes are "Batshit liberal" ?
    • abrahamsen 14y ago
      Assembler is so liberal that you have to be deeply conservative in order to write code for it.
      • zaptheimpaler 14y ago
        Exactly! I think assembly language falls through the cracks in this way of classification - languages themselves can be liberal/conservative, and the communities using them can be liberal/conservative. In the majority of cases, these two will be aligned. But in assembly code, there are a lot of different ways to screw things up (batshit liberal purely based on the risk profile of the language), so if you want code that works, you need to be extremely risk averse (conservative) from the outset.
• thebluesky 14y ago
  Yegge: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yegge http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yegge "A measurement of length of a piece of writing, particularly when indicating a length excessive for the genre. A Yegge is approximately 4000 words or 25 kilobytes. Named for well known programmer and technical blogger Steve Yegge, whose blog up to about 2009 was notorious for entries of approximately 1 or 2 Yegges in length, vastly exceeding the typical length of blog entries in the genre."
• priestc 14y ago
  I was thinking about this sort of thing a few weeks ago. I think it's more about 'control' rather than 'safety'. Heres my take: fiscally conservative politician = tight control on spending fiscally liberal politician = loose control on spending (just throw money at whatever, who cares) fiscally conservative programmer = tight control over code (refactoring, design patterns, documentation, tests) fiscally liberal programmer = loose control over code (who cares if it's spaghetti code, as long as it runs) socially conservative politician = tight control over people (no abortions/gay marriage/legal weed for anyone) socially liberal politician = loose control over people (let people do what they want) socially conservative programmer = tight control over people (heavy process, waterfall) socially liberal programmer = loose control over people (light process, agile, "just write good software") I'm a socially liberal, fiscally conservative programmer. At my last job everyone was fiscally liberal and socially conservative. I did not last long at that job.
• narag 14y ago
  Honestly, I can't see it that way. People that I met and I know how they work and think don't fit in this axis at all. The distinction that I do see is between people that trusts experience of what works and what doesn't (and still willing to test new ideas when it makes sense) and people that rigidly adheres to policies or dogmas. The type of tools they use and like are circumstantial. It's more of a empiricists vs. authority thing.
  • naitbit 14y ago
    In the beginning I too wanted to write that I don't agree with this split. Then I come to conclusion that he met far more programmers then I so he probably knows better. Anyway I'm not sure were to put myself on this axis. My behavior changes depending on other variables(what consequences would bug have/how many times code is going to be executed etc). FE: critical part of commercial software (like money calculation) would be written in a way that would try to make it obvious that there are no errors, in language with type checking with unit tests and if possible even with mathematical proof of correctness. With code review and QA thrown at it afterwards. To sum up very conservative(and costly) approach. On the other hand my holiday photos got completely different treatment. Short python script, that would batch their HDR process in a way specific for their content and with a lot of dependencies to my current desktop setup, without any unit tests(script thrown up few temporary files making it easy for manual debug, had backup of my photos in case script ate them). The only conservative thing that I could think of in this setup was that I made it concurrent to use 4 cores because it was only one line change and 4time speed up in lengthy process was worth it. Can someone suggest were on liberal-conservative axis am I?
• alinajaf 14y ago
  I think as a Ruby (and occasionally C) programmer I stand firmly in the liberal camp, but is it weird that I sort of like Haskell too? I find the idea of expressing the semantics of my program through types to be useful sometimes. Then again my actually political views tend to span the liberal/conservative spectrum so I suppose this is not surprising.
  • duaneb 14y ago
    Ruby is more liberal than c (duck typing) Haskell is more liberal than ruby (functional programming) C is more liberal than Haskell (weak typing) Also, I am apparently a radically conservative programmer, but my political views in real life tend toward radical liberalism. I think any correlation says more about age than it does about politics.
    • alinajaf 14y ago
      > Haskell is more liberal than ruby (functional programming) Not according to the article, which is what my comment was in response to. > I think any correlation says more about age than it does about politics. Quite possible, I'm 26.
      • duaneb 14y ago
        > Not according to the article, which is what my comment was in response to. I see. Yes, Haskell meets all the criteria for a conservative language, emphasizing safety, and verifiability, and automated testing. However, purely anecdotally, I can't think of a single person I've worked for that uses C++ approving of Haskell because it is so radically different. But perhaps this doesn't matter.
        • alinajaf 14y ago
          I tend to agree, on my own personal scale of liberal/conservative (which has little to do with type systems), I'd rank Haskell as fantastically liberal. You could probably enumerate the companies that use it in production on one hand.
• cturner 14y ago
  Broad-brush talk is a step backwards. Political talk and thinking is poisoned by the ideas of "left" and "right" even though those phrases haven't had a connection to reality since the French First Republic. It'll probably be fine. Politics is in many respects a zero-sum game, and polarises participants into two camps. Software isn't like that.
  • stonemetal 14y ago
    The ideas expressed in the article ring fairly true to me. I wouldn't have couched them in political terms, because as you point out there is too much emotion in that arena. I tend to think of it as Engineers vs Artists. On the one hand you have Linus' think it through, do it right. On the other hand you have PG's explore, discover, express yourself style. Each method is valid in different situations.
• yaongi 14y ago
  So, this is the culmination of 8 years of rants and blog posts? This is what he's been trying to say all that time? What a peak he has reached. What an insight. I'm trying to think of an apt analogy for this post that doesn't involve vomit or defecation, but it's hard. From the introduction proclaiming how readers will be stunned by how clearly and resoundingly true the revelation revealed within will be, to the literary diarrhea it's followed by... it's like a little kid proudly telling his parents he finally used the toilet properly only for them to find he completely missed the bowl. Yeah, I failed. If the political spectrum is deeply flawed, as he said, then why even try to hack it onto something completely unrelated, made of individual technical points where each programmer may have a different approach? I don't know, I like a lot of his past posts, but I don't dig this one. I don't think it provides any useful insight whatsoever.
  • jeremiep 14y ago
    I get the feeling his essay is setting the scene for more to come, most likely around Project Grok. The name is well suited, Yegge really understands how code works. Why hack on it? Because it's what hackers do. Steve only pushes it further and hacks the philosophy of it. I love his essays as food for thought, and I respect him for publishing his in-process thoughts about the matter to let the idea out. To me, this post was quite entertaining and broadened my perspective a little bit again. The only downside, as is the case with most of his other essays, is that it definitively wasn't long enough.
  • awj 14y ago
    Go read the first comments from a sixteen year old social outcast who just read Atlas Shrugged for the first time. It's that, but with Yegge as the pimply protagonist and American politics playing the role of Objectivism.
• robocop 14y ago
  I think a better analogy is Conservative: the existing system must not break! Progressive: we must add new features!
• sandGorgon 14y ago
  Clojure is tied very strongly to the Java toolchain (note "toolchain" rather than "ecosystem"). The packaging system and package managers use Maven and Java jars instead of a clojure-based one. This means that promising projects like Clojure CLR have no chance of taking off the ground, unlike say Ruby vs Jruby vs Ruby EE vs Rubinius.
• pshc 14y ago
  My project is accomplishing this lofty and almost insanely ambitious goal through the (A) normative, language-neutral, cross-language definitions of, and (B) subsequent standardization of, several distinct parts of the toolchain: (I) compiler and interpreter Intermediate Representations and metadata, (II) editor-client-to-server protocols, (III) source code indexing, analysis and query languages, and (IV) fine-grained dependency specifications at the level of build systems, source files, and code symbols. So this is the project that Yegge mentioned would turn "all code [...] into Wikipedia." Man, my ongoing project is more similar to it than I thought. I find it curious that he would even bother to mention (IV) though. (IV) falls right out if you start from the correct data representation, which I would have assumed from (A). I wonder if he's still listing dependencies explicitly.
• duaneb 14y ago
  I think that a better parallel dichotomy would be features vs quality, in a world where they are mutually exclusive. However, I think Yegge wasted too much thought on this. It is the software that dictates how conservative a piece of software is: bugs and stability are generally tolerated in user-facing software because at worst the user has a bad experience. However, a database better be as close to 100% reliable as possible, which in turn leads to testing and static analysis, meaning typing... It is not really negotiable. I think there are way too many variables for a linear scale to provide meaningful comparison.
• michaelochurch 14y ago
  I think I'm a software libertarian. If you like dynamic typing and can write good, legible code in a language like Python or Lisp, do it. If you like static typing, knock yourself out. If you want to use an IDE, go for it. If you want to use emacs, do it. Hell, if you like object-oriented programming, try it out. I think 95% of "object-oriented" programming (as currently practiced) is junk, but the other 5% is legitimately valuable. If you have the taste to pick from that 5%, go ahead. What you shouldn't have the right to do is impose complexity on other people. Use whatever environment you like, but if your code depends on your environment, that's bad. If people can't get work done because they're cleaning up your messes, that's bad. Be as liberal and as kinky as you want in your own sandbox, but don't impose your wacky, untested DSL on everyone else. That said, I like statically typed languages. ML is the only language I've encountered where reading average-case code is enjoyable. (Scala's a great language, but average-case code is ugly due to the Java influence. There's a fair amount of spaghetti code written in it due to the cultural legacy of the SpaghettiFactoryFactory Java culture. I can't speak for Haskell because I haven't seen enough.) I think that's neat and very rare in the programming world. How much code is enjoyable to read? 1 percent, maybe? In Ocaml, that number is a lot higher. Probably around 50%. 50 percent of Java code isn't even legible. Being able to actually read other peoples' code is nice, and it's one thing I miss about working in Ocaml. I'm probably more in line with the hard-line conservative camp in terms of my view of complexity: avoid it unless you need it. The Unix philosophy works. Religious X-oriented programming doesn't. Big Code leads to fail. Small-program methodology's little programs (Unix philosophy) are written to solve problems: do one thing and do it well. Ambitious projects should be structured and respected as systems, not all-or-nothing, massive single-program megaliths with no clear communication policy among modules. Small-program development works. Big Software is written to get promotions. That produces the next generation's legacy horrors. Also, structuring your company around 17-day "iterations" is stupid. Et cetera. I also tend to think that a lot of the features that scare typical software conservatives are genuinely worthwhile. Macros in Lisp are important and can be very beneficial-- if used conservatively. Cleverness for its own sake is bad, but there are times when macros are very useful. Document what you're doing, and make sure it's tasteful and makes sense before you let anyone else depend on the work, but go ahead and do it. I wouldn't have learned what not to do with macros had I not made a few mistakes when I first encountered them. So, with a mix of opinions from the "conservative" and "liberal" camps, I can't say where I fall. I like macros (when used by disciplined people) but I also like static typing. Both turn out to be very useful tools. Consequently, I find that I like a lot of different languages and insist not on a specific one, but on small-program methodology so that people can use the right tool for the job. I'm conservative because I dislike complexity (I think "software liberals" are OK with complexity as long as it's under the hood-- most metaprogramming involves extremely complex solutions that, when they work and the abstractions don't leak, although this is rare, allow clean interfaces-- whereas I'm not comfortable making that distinction) but I (a) understand that liberalism is essential to driving innovation, and (b) can't classify myself as a conservative because management is inherently conservative and is, in software, almost never the solution to the problem. Usually, it is the problem. Most companies fall to shit not because they have some difficult code-- every codebase has some crap in it-- but because management mandates that they use the bad code (often for political reasons, like the original architect being a crony of the manager) as-is instead of taking the time to understand or replace it. I'd like to see how Valve evolves over the next 5 years, because I think management in software is usually a source of undesirable complexity, rather than the safeguard against complexity that it thinks it is being. If Valve can give us a determination either way on whether software can work without managers in the first place, that'd be incredibly useful information. Not surprisingly, software politics also has a lot of individual inconsistencies and hypocrisy. Corporatism (in politics, not software) is neither socialism nor capitalism but a system designed to give the best of both worlds to a well-connected elite and the worst of both to everyone else. (Consider air travel as a microcosm: Soviet experience and service quality and comfort, mean-spirited and capricious-- but very capitalistic-- pricing.) I think the same exists in software politics and the typical managerial conservatism. People and organizations can identify in name with liberalism or conservatism, but tend to pick and choose as suits them. (For an example of this inconsistency: Google, a bastion of software conservatism, allowed GCL to exist.) What makes 90 percent of software jobs so fucking miserable isn't those rock star, "undisciplined" Rails liberals or stodgy gray-haired conservatives. Rather, it's a corporatist "crony capitalism" state where people who win managerial blessing get liberalism (i.e. the autonomy to do whatever they want and freely impose complexity downstream) while the rest of the drones get stonewalled with a supposedly stiff-lipped conservatism (e.g. "you can't [fix that codebase | use that language | pursue that side project] because we can't afford the risk") that is presented as principled, although the drones see managerial favorites getting through that wall on a daily basis, so they aren't fooled.
• cletus 14y ago
  As much as some commenters are (weirdly?) railing against this classification scheme I think the underlying idea that software conservatism is about risk aversion is essentially accurate. Perhaps another way of framing this is to ask the question: are you optimizing for the best case or the worst case? This ultimately is a form of risk management. And I'm not talking in the algorithmic sense, meaning complexity expressed as the asymptotically worst case. I'm talking about people, software and ecosystems. Let me illustrate this idea with Java. - C++ has operator overloads. Java does not? Why? Because people might abuse them. That's optimizing for the worst case (ie bad or inexperienced programmers). Properly used, operator overloading can lead to extremely readable code; - Java has checked exceptions and uses them liberally (pun intended). C#, as one example, only has unchecked exceptions. Why? Philosophically the Java language designers (and many of its users) feel that this forces callers to deal with exceptions. Pragmatically (IMHO) it does not and leads to more cases of exceptions being simply swallowed. But again this is optimizing for the worst case ie programmers who should deal with a particular error condition but won't; - Java has no multiple inheritance. Same story: it can be abused ("it is known"). But also mixins can be a powerful metaphor. - Rinse and repeat for duck typing, extension methods, etc. Putting Python two steps from Ruby strikes me as an interesting choice. I'd say the difference is at most one. I'll also agree that Google as a company (based on my own much more limited experience than Yegge's) is firmly conservative. The style of writing Javascript that he refers to is about writing Google Closure code with all sorts of directives to aid the Closure Compiler (I describe Closure as putting the Java back into Javascript). I also see a lot of Python code that isn't really Python. It's Java expressed in Python syntax rather than idiomatic Python and that is kind of sad. Which isn't to say that any of this is necessarily bad (or good). It's just a (software) political viewpoint you need to be comfortable with (or at least can tolerate) or (to quote the South Park meme) "You're gonna have a bad time". One of the comments linked Worse is Better [1], which is worth a read too. [1]: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs240/readings/worse-is-better.html http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs240/readings/worse-is-better...
  • thebluesky 14y ago
    ...except that most of the features you mention are in Scala in some for or another, yet he classifies Scala as "hardcore conservative"
• dsantiago 14y ago
  I'm trying to think of what anti-macros Clojure talk by a "key presenter" he might be referring to. I'm only familiar with the talks from Clojure/conj, so the only one that I can think of is Christophe Grand's (not= DSLs macros) talk from 2010[1]. If so, I think his summary mischaracterizes the content of that talk, but it could be another talk he's thinking of. [1] http://blip.tv/clojure/christophe-grand-not-dsl-macros-4540700 http://blip.tv/clojure/christophe-grand-not-dsl-macros-45407...
  • fogus 14y ago
    I'm fairly certain that's the one he's talking about. Having watched it live and on video, its message is not as dire as it's often made out to be. Regardless, it touches on a point of pride for Lisp programmers and as a result is viewed in a negative light by some. I offered a mild rebuttal at the following Conj called "The Macronomicon" (http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-macronomicon-5970233 http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-macronomicon-597023...).
  • richhickey 14y ago
    I think Christophe's is the talk, and Yegge seriously misunderstood it, if he even bothered to watch it. Christophe's point was that basing the underpinnings of a DSL on macros was frequently a mistake, vs a data + functions approach that "leads to greater dynamicity". It is inarguable that macros are less flexible than functions (e.g. they can't be applied) and less composable. Christophe's argument wasn't against macros, but that they should be the last layer of sugar, not the core mechanism of a DSL. This approach has been advocated and practiced by Lispers forever. Ditto the advice to not use a macro when a function will do. And for Yegge to imply that more serious Clojure devs like Christophe are macro averse because they are afraid they might not understand someone else's macro code shows his complete lack of familiarity with Christophe's macro skills and other work of the community. Taking potshots at things you don't understand and people you don't know (while leaving out the link so others could verify) smells like a FOX-news rhetorical approach to me. Ditto political labeling (though in the programming community the negative tag is "conservative", whilst in politics it is "liberal"). Tag the thing you don't like with the negative label, then rationalize, and spew misinformation. "Clojure's community came pre-populated with highly conservative programmers from the pure-functional world: basically Haskell/ML types": surveys[0][1] say... nope. He even ignores the bulk of his own criteria in his labeling exercise. Clojure has almost none of the things on his "Conservative Stuff" list except STM (huh, is GC conservative too?) and almost all of the things on his "Liberal Stuff" list. None of his 1-8 conservative points apply to Clojure (and I see nothing wrong with conservative about speed - Common Lisp has always pursued it, and its pursuit always involves risk), and all of his 9 liberal points apply to Clojure. Clojure devs are liberals that want their programs to work. If Yegge doesn't like Clojure, fine. But to rationalize like this is weak. Yawn. [0] http://cemerick.com/2010/06/07/results-from-the-state-of-clojure-summer-2010-survey/ http://cemerick.com/2010/06/07/results-from-the-state-of-clo... [1] http://cemerick.com/2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-clojure-survey/ http://cemerick.com/2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-...
• Darmani 14y ago
  This is a brilliant move by Yegge. Now if you call him wrong, you're just like the guy who attacks Aunt Marge's politics at the family dinner. Unfortunately, your business is not Aunt Marge. You need to be able to make the tough calls and say that, no, banning the color yellow is not a viable policy. Software engineering and programming languages are both seriously-studied disciplines, and all too often, the evidence comes down conclusively in favor of one position. To pick an easy target, in many languages like Java and C++, null can be passed in place of (almost) any type. But 1) Empirical studies show that values intended to be non-nullable are more common... 2) ...which means that many method definitions are cluttered with is-null checks (to cut down the exponentially-increased state space)... 3) ...and it's just as easy to provide a feature to turn it on when it's wanted (option types/Maybe monad)... 4) ...which many companies hack into C++/Java anyway (various annotations and preprocessors) This is a pretty solid case. Liberals win -- it's less code. Conservatives win -- there are fewer bugs. Sometimes things really are that one-sided.
  • gaius 14y ago
    Yes, software engineering will never be engineering as long as so much of it s just people's unsubstantiated opinions.
• EzGraphs 14y ago
  Some of the tendencies depend upon the nature of the organization. Startups tend liberal (want to change the world). Corporations tend conservative (want to avoid major mistakes). The selection of tools does not always reflect this immediately though. Also some classification of technology as conservative or liberal depends upon the competing technology it is running against. I was a bit surprised to see Python classified as liberal - but it makes sense when comparing it to Java. If it is being compared with Ruby it is very conservative ("do things one way"). There are some non technological risks that influence technology decisions. Visual Basic may be "Hardcore Liberal" from a language perspective, but it is pretty conservative politically (backed by Microsoft, lots of available experienced programmers). Steve as usual has interesting insights. I am not sure that this is a paradigm that completely fits - but it does provide a perspective for understanding fundamental beliefs that can lead to disagreements in software projects.
  • EzGraphs 14y ago
    The general risk-adverse vs. change-oriented paradigm makes a lot of sense. The problem is that it not limited to the technical realm in most organizations. Technology decisions often need to be justified by management who don't necessarily use purely technical criteria for their choices. Some rather simple criteria can be used to group languages - age and popularity. Perl, JavaScript, Java, Visual Basic are conservative in that they are popular, well known, established languages (even though they cross the Yegge's whole spectrum). Haskell, while extremely conservative technically, is extremely liberal in many organizations - where there are no currently implemented projects using the language and no programmers experienced using it.
• prtamil 14y ago
  Now i understood why i love Common Lisp and hate Clojure. It has nothing to do with Community or language. Its about Me. I'm a liberal. Knowing that i'm a liberal liberated me.
  • lukev 14y ago
    What confounds me is that while I'm a liberal by every other measure Yegge proposes, I still love Clojure.
• ezyang 14y ago
  Hidden inside this fascinating screed is an announcement about the "Google Grok" project, which appears to be something of an Eclipse-killer for dynamic languages. It's good to hear that Google is working on this problem, and I'm interested to see what they come up with.
  • cageface 14y ago
    That was the most interesting point for me too. Mobile development has reminded me of the significant tooling benefits of static languages but also the verbosity and awkwardness of said languages. If I could have an IntelliJ-level IDE for Ruby or Python or JS I'd be very happy.
    • rabbitfang 14y ago
      If I could have an IntelliJ-level IDE for Ruby or Python or JS I'd be very happy. The company behind IntelliJ already makes IDEs for Ruby, Python and JS: Python: Pycharm http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/ http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/ Ruby: RubyMine http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/ http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/ JS: Webstorm http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/ http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/
      • cageface 14y ago
        I was a rubymine customer for 1.0 and it's good but nothing like intellij is for java. Static typing just makes building good tools so much easier.
• notime 14y ago
  Steve's almost got it right that there are axes, but I think he tried too hard to fit it into a two party system. I think instead there are the axes of safety, efficiency (which is almost the same as the next, but is more in the context of the C vs. C++ argument), speed/load of system (and tendency to develop to handle more load than is needed vs. less for the particular application), development speed/cleverness (typically dynamicism vs. static these days), clarity (which is not the opposite of cleverness), and verbosity.
• brown9-2 14y ago
  Off-topic but does Google Plus offer any way to view a post nearly full-screen, without all the extra margin and white space taking up 2/3rds of the screen? A bit annoying that the post text only takes up about 33% of my available screen real estate, even on the "view single post" URL: http://cl.ly/image/1p1B2o3D262g http://cl.ly/image/1p1B2o3D262g
  • naitbit 14y ago
    Personally for longer page browsing I pivot my screen vertically, zoom and scroll to make content fit my screen. It may not be fastest way but gets job done. It works better on Google plus then on some other pages(were some toolbars obfuscates content on zoomed page, or which get to wide for screen). On non pivoted screen I usually have browser only on left halve on the screen and do it same way. There may be some plugin that would fit you more though.
    • vorg 14y ago
      You're lucky you can view any of it. In China nothing from gplus arrives.
      • technomancy 14y ago
        That's called a blessing in disguise.
  • danielweber 14y ago
    When I page-down, I have to scroll back up a few lines because the border is eating too much of the visible screen. :(
    • brown9-2 14y ago
      This is a major annoyance as well. Long-form posts have a poor reading experience on Google Plus.
  • why-el 14y ago
• kator 14y ago
  I know I will regret this but here is a little survey I whipped up quickly. It's static so results are local to your browser.. Enjoy: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/704864/software-politics.html https://dl.dropbox.com/u/704864/software-politics.html
  • kator 14y ago
    Not that anyone cares: Liberal <---------------------|-----------------------+---------------------------------------------> Conservative Or as a totally unscientific number: -24
  • sramsay 14y ago
    Very surprised to see what a centrist I am; my unscientific number is -5). I would have pegged myself as much more liberal, but when it comes to specific points having to do with design and deployment, I'm more conservative than I would have thought.
    • kator 14y ago
      I was a bit surprised at my result since I've done large systems and have been developing for 30 years. I think I lean toward more of the "get it done" camp unless it's a super high-production (i.e. money gets lost when down) system then I might tend further toward the center. :)
• hugoestr 14y ago
  His real argument is that there is a dynamic typing vs static typing divide. Didn't we know that already? I would like to believe that the political bit was just a well timed hook to get people to read his blog. He understands that the right incendiary rant will bring readers. If it is sincere, though, it shows a disturbing level of crankiness.
  • ajanuary 14y ago
    His argument is that there is a reason behind the dynamic vs static divide that reaches out wider than that.
• parasubvert 14y ago
  This doesn't actually seem to be all that new of an argument: the debate used to be about "craft" vs. "engineering" or between "software is math" and "software is mechanism". For example of what's pretty close to a Yegge rant of the 1980's, see Edsger Dijkstra, "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science" [1]. It seems to be bemoaning similar debates in the software field, though from a very "conservative" perspective, since Dijkstra prefers that a formal proof should be required with every program, and one should completely avoid anthropomorphism in discussing software design. Another thought that's crossed my mind: one of the reasons for the evolution of these approaches to politics and risk over the years has to do with the scale of impact. Liberally messing around with a social and economic systems can lead to widespread human disaster: China's Great Leap Forward comes to mind. How the software is used and how reliable it needs to be is an engineering tradeoff with regards to cost & time. This is often why you tend to see much more liberal approaches to software in smaller companies - the scale of impact is much smaller (in terms of customer base, and investment) when you cock up. Now, it's clear that larger companies, particularly many IT shops, could learn a thing or two about being "progressive conservatives", as they've "conserved" for far too long and are caught in the trap of special interests (i.e. traditional vendors dependent on their cash). Fear of dynamic languages, open source, or cloud services, or non-waterfall development is mostly a reactionary ideology grounded with some kernels of truth - static typing DOES help codebases scale (but you shouldn't be proud of a large codebase), you can't just pick ANY open source library as some are DOA, or ANY cloud as some are unreliable, and tinkering with your delivery methodology can reduce your performance greatly due to confusion, plus there's plenty of cargo-cult agile consultants waiting to rope you in. So, you need to think these things through. But that's not an excuse for avoidance. Perhaps that means I'm a software moderate. [1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036... (edit: typo)
• mononcqc 14y ago
  I truly fear we'll get into debates of software conservatives vs. software liberals, and at some point some jackass will say "of course but <person x> is a researcher for <liberal/conservative> software engineering" as if it were a contest. If that happens, I predict a fucking hellhole and I can only imagine myself leaving the industry at once.
• eternalban 14y ago
  "Just as in real-world politics" it is a 'misguided' idea to view the political space as a 1 dimensional space, ...
• swah 14y ago
  Wait, what is http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlternateHardAndSoftLayers http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlternateHardAndSoftLayers then ?
• kstenerud 14y ago
  notime, your account was hellbanned 15 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4294279 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4294279 priestc, your account was hellbanned 26 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245644 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245644
• swah 14y ago
  I tend to relate to conservative with "small government", and in that light Lua would be a conservative language, because it has a small core and doesn't try to do too much. His conservative definition is seems to be "everything that is wrong with the world" or something. --------- Also, this older rant reads to me as Yegge saying that this "conservative guy" was responsible for Google's success: "I've been debating whether to say this, since it'll smack vaguely of obsequiousness, but I've realized that one of the Google seed engineers (exactly one) is almost singlehandedly responsible for the amazing quality of Google's engineering culture. And I mean both in the sense of having established it, and also in the sense of keeping the wheel spinning. I won't name the person, and for the record he almost certainly loathes me, for reasons that are my own damn fault. But I'd hire him in a heartbeat: more evidence, I think, that the Done, and Gets Things Smart folks aren't necessarily your friends. They're just people you're lucky enough to have worked with. At first it's entirely non-obvious who's responsible for Google's culture of engineering discipline: the design docs, audited code reviews, early design reviews, readability reviews, resisting introduction of new languages, unit testing and code coverage, profiling and performance testing, etc. You know. The whole gamut of processes and tools that quality engineering organizations use to ensure that code is open, readable, documented, and generally non-shoddy work. But if you keep an eye on the emails that go out to Google's engineering staff, over time a pattern emerges: there's one superheroic dude who's keeping us all in line." (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.br/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.br/2008/06/done-and-gets-thi...)
  • zaptheimpaler 14y ago
    Thank you for the link to the older Yegge article. I REALLY needed that to remind me I'm stupid again.
• fleaflicker 14y ago
  In his section on Tech Corporations, he classifies Apple as "Diagnosis: no idea." Is there a reason nobody speaks publicly about Apple's engineering culture? We hear a lot about the culture at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. But I've never met an Apple engineer. And I've never read any detailed accounts by an insider. Does anybody have any good resources? Or is there a very restrictive confidentiality policy?
  • outside1234 14y ago
    Apple is not a software culture. It is better to think of Apple like you think about Sony - they do software but it is only to support their design and hardware efforts. That said, I'd characterize Apple is liberal. They put immense pressure on engineers to ship software as soon as possible to "get the new shiny out".
  • jfb 14y ago
    I can only speak as to Apple as of 2004-2009, when I was there. It was intensely pragmatic, much more so than other companies of comparable size I'd been at. The focus was on shipping, and whatever it took to get product out the door. Once projects were no longer directly in the gaze of Barad-dûr, however, politics set in and things ossified rapidly. Day to day in my world was a lot of C, Objective-C and C++, with Python for rapid prototyping and glue code; Java formed the backbone of the store infrastructure, but there was plenty of other stuff going on. Fairly standard architecture (huge Oracle DB, loads of web servers). Teams tended to be undermanned, so there was constant tension between getting stuff done and standardization; much of the time, the wrong balance was struck, meaning that people couldn't easily switch roles, but still had a lot of bureaucratic scutwork to manage. Things were improving when I left, and I imagine that they have continued to do so.
• kstenerud 14y ago
  What "politics" I adopt depends mostly on what I'm building. If it's a library that someone else will use, I try to play as conservatively as possible, and I fully expect that despite my best efforts those developers will uncover lots of bugs regardless. If it's a mission critical application, I'll also be conservative. The more pain there is in fixing things later, the more careful I'll be up front. When I'm writing a game, I'll play it more fast-and-loose. So long as any glitches don't crash it or open an exploit or ruin the user experience, it's usually an acceptable trade-off. When I'm writing stuff for myself, I go crazy, trying out all new fads and methodologies just for the hell of it. This way, I learn new things and get enough experience with them to mark them as conservative-safe and liberal-safe. My only sticking point is this: If someone competent cannot follow your code, you haven't documented things properly.
  • dasil003 14y ago
    This is essentially what I commented on G+ and what I came here to say. A programmer who does not understand the tradeoffs of liberalism vs conservatism as Yegge defines them is not a good engineer. At best they might be talented at doing things a very specific way, sort of like a designer whose stuff all looks the same and is often inappropriate for the job at hand. Such a person is more an artist than a designer, and I'd make the same distinction for someone who writes log-processing code in Haskell or codes software for a spaceship in Ruby.
    • pjscott 14y ago
      Actually, I'm pretty sure you could make a good case for log processing in Haskell. There are some businesses with lots of log data, containing any number of dimensions along which you might legitimately want to slice and dice, with their formats and schemas changing over time. Haskell's type checking is really good at catching the type of bugs that tend to crawl out of this kind of application, and its speed is a good thing when you're dealing with a whole lot of logs.
      • dasil003 14y ago
        Sure, bad example, but the point stands. Not everything requires type safety, and playing fast and loose with dynamic typing is not always faster. Programmers shouldn't be ideological, they should always be striving for the best solution by understanding the tradeoffs in any given situation. To do so effectively requires both liberalism and conservatism as Yegge defines them.
• engtech 14y ago
  I've noticed this divide for a long time, but the way I've always plotted the axis is "urban" vs "rural". urban - accepts a certain amount of chaos for the benefits of reducing redundancy, wants to centralize code, reuse via shared centralized code rural - wants to be isolated, wants to "see" everything, wants to have control over everything, reuse via cut-and-paste
• mej10 14y ago
  Making these arbitrary categorizations into "liberal" and "conservative" for things where we have all of the data is pretty much useless. http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_insid...
• kephra 14y ago
  One thing came up in mind " United States has only one party:the property party. It’s the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican. " From a German point of view both liberals and conservatives are right wing. And his article is totally missing any left wing politics. He is missing the green, the socialists, the communists, and the anarchists point of view here. And making it one dimensional also does not fit: What about Christian socialists, what about conservative greens, what about anarcho-capitalists, or national socialists? e.g. I would classify myself (when it comes to programming) as anarcho-capitalist: I'm using the language that best fits the problem, without bias. And I'm earning most of my money with free software. I also can not agree with how he positioned some languages, e.g. Perl might look liberal at first, but the CPAN community is more conservative when it comes to constraining regression test or documentation than the Ruby or Python people. Also ASM might look liberal at first, but if you ever worked in a closed shop, you know that ASM/370 coders have a really conservative approach to create software.
• austintaylor 14y ago
  I think this is fundamentally flawed. Take HAML, for instance. It tends to be polarizing, but not along the axis he has laid out. People who don't like it usually point to the unfamiliar and non-standard syntax (conservative), but the thing that I like about it is that it is more structured, and less error-prone than string splicing (also conservative). In general, when I fall on the liberal side of an argument, I think it is for the reasons he gives (no fear, resist ossification). But when I fall on the conservative side (which happens just as often) it is not because of fear, but because I think that mathematically rigorous abstractions (pure functions, persistent data structures, etc) offer a more powerful way to approach the problem. I think my attitude toward bugs (which he suggests is the defining issue) is more nuanced than this spectrum allows. Bugs are inevitable, and it's not the end of the world when you have a bug. We need debuggers. But I think that over time, if we are doing anything right, we should be growing a stable core of our codebase that is increasingly flexible and bug-free. I guess maybe this could be considered a centrist view. It is certainly neither liberal nor conservative. Someone in the thread mentioned pragmatism vs. idealism. I think this is a much more useful distinction. I would definitely consider myself an idealist. But the pragmatic-ideal axis doesn't map to the conservative-liberal axis at all.
• sidcool 14y ago
  Pretty long essay, but worth a read.
• postfuturist 14y ago
  The things he said about the Clojure community are in contradiction with the data from the 2012 State of Clojure survey here: http://cemerick.com/2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-clojure-survey/ http://cemerick.com/2012/08/06/results-of-the-2012-state-of-... . Steve claims that Clojure folks come from the Haskell/ML world when the survey lists the "former primary language" of survey takers to be 1% Haskell, 0% SML, 0% Ocaml. Whereas they actually come from Java, Python and Ruby mostly. The Clojure "replacement" in the survey is all over the map with Common Lisp, Erlang, Haskell, Java, Python, Ruby, Scala and Scheme all performing well. The liberal/conservative thing is a false dichotomy and Clojure community is probably living proof of that.
  • spottr 14y ago
    Yegge has a bone to pick with Clojure. It's about his feeling towards the community, the language and the direction Rich Hickey is taking it [1]. It's funny, reminds me of "In which Everyone had better shape up" [2]. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2466731 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2466731 [2] http://wondermark.com/333/ http://wondermark.com/333/
• j_baker 14y ago
  I think one could make an argument that Haskell is like Fascism. They're both extremely liberal applications of extremely conservative beliefs. This can make categorizing them difficult. Scheme, Erlang and company are more like communism: extremely liberal applications of extremely liberal beliefs. So much so that people tend to view them as "good in idea, but flawed in practice". Python and Ruby are more like traditional liberalism. They bring in new ideas, but not in excess. Scala and Clojure seem remarkably centrist. They both bring in good ideas from both the liberal and conservative camps. Lastly, C is "old guard" conservatism, C++ is a Bush-style "compassionate conservatism" that tries to please everyone while being labeled "conservative", Java is a neo-con, and C# might be compared to the Tea Party.
• ericbb 14y ago
  I just want to add a link for people interested in this discussion. (Dynamic Languages are Static Languages by Robert Harper): http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/dynamic-languages-are-static-languages/ http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/dynamic-lang... With HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346590 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346590
• dusklight 14y ago
  I don't really think it is fair to characterize Clojure as conservative. If anything Clojure was created out of the motivation to have the cake and eat it too. Most other languages grant you the benefits of type-safety but at the cost of reduced flexibility/increased complexity. Clojure tries as much as possible to give you the pragmatic benefits of both while mitigating the costs.
• nirvana 14y ago
  I first noticed something like this, though I draw the lines differently, in the 1980s. What's interesting is that there has been a shift over the years to where "programming" has come ot have a strong ideological bias to only one type. The types I noticed then I call Cowboys and Architects. These are just terms I'm using for convenience, not meant as pejoratives. Cowboys are now more common: Some programmers write a bunch of sloppy code without bothering to ever design anything. Their methedology for making a product seems to be akin to bashing to the code into the shape it needs to be eventually. This group of people tend to advocate policies that assume everyone else is writing crappy code as well- unit tests, agile, etc. For instance, agile rejects design and assumes you can't know what the right shape for the code is going to be more than a week in advance and that all code is maleable without repercussions. Architects are now rare: Other programmers will sit for a week and think without writing any code. When they do, they sit down and over the course of an hour (or however long it takes to type it) will write out the code for the complete system or module. It will be bug-free with the exception of typos. Once the typos are fixed (Generally by getting the compiler to accept the code) the programmer can move on to implementing the next bit of functionality. Sometimes there are errors in the code working with other code, generally integration errors, but not errors in the thinking of the programmer. These programmers only accept that Agile makes sense because the business side of things can't make up its mind, so they architect core systems that are flexible to support multiple business needs, but don't need to be rewritten or bashed around, because they did it right the first time. I'm of the latter type, and I have tested this objectively, by producing a 10,000 line iOS App like this, which has been in use for several years by tens of thousands of people with no crashes or other defects (a few minor conceptual bugs- mismatch between the features and the expectations of the business, which were fixed)... and not a single unit test. It compiled, it worked, and almost all the development time was spent on the UI. It has had major releases (eg: going from being iPad only to a universal app, etc.) It has built in reporting for exceptions, and all of the reported exceptions are the result of things other than my code (eg: there are several situations where iOS will crash an app if it needs to or due to problems with pre-release versions of iOS, and those are what generate the exceptions.) No customer reported bugs either. (though they do have requests for things working slightly differently and new features, no programming errors reported by customers.) The industry is so dominated by a culture of "all code is crap" that I think many people think that all programmers are cowboys and even Steve here is delineating types of Cowboys, and nobody believes architects exist. Can you imagine someone saying "unit tests are a waste of time, they just double the amount of work with no benefit.". It produces a litany of excuses for why this isn't true. ("You need them if other people work on your code!", "maybe for a team of one", "you're assuming you'll never forget a design decision", etc.) I know this message will get responses along those lines-- its because Cowboyism has become an ideology. Yegge is right - programmers are ideological. I'm not a savant and I'm not rare. Architects like me were about %50 of the programmers out there when I started out. I think the mainstreaming of "hacking" has produced a lot of people who are taught to be cowboys and a culture that encourages cowboyism.
• gwillen 14y ago
  The comments yield more or less the response I expected, to wit: The 'liberals' agree that this is a useful distinction, and the 'conservatives' complain that the distinction is bullshit, and serves only to try to justify the misguided beliefs of the 'liberals'.
• mark-r 14y ago
  I think he misclassified exceptions. A true conservative avoids exceptions and uses error code returns instead.
• brlewis 14y ago
  Kent Pitman on programming languages as political parties: 2001: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/01/11/13/0420226/kent-m-pitmans-second-wind http://developers.slashdot.org/story/01/11/13/0420226/kent-m... 1994: http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Lambda.html http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Lambda.html
• pilgrim689 14y ago
  Do any other engineering fields suffer from these broad-stroke categorizations? Do Mechanical Engineers have additive VS subtractive manufacturing debates? Or do they just shut up and solve problems?
• lispm 14y ago
  The characterization of Clojure is questionable. A conservative would want to avoid risk and would be against change. About the only really conservative thing of Clojure I would see that it preserves the investments made into the JVM and uses an accepted technology as a base. Other than that it is a radical break for the Clojure user base. The Clojure user base does not come from ML or Haskell. It comes from Java, Ruby, Python and a few other languages. But not from statically-typed functional languages and not even from Lisp. Even Rich Hickey does not come from there. With Clojure you keep one feet on the ground (the Java ecosystem) and the other feet is in the unknown dark water.
• guscost 14y ago
  As with regular politics, it always depends on the project, and the independents know best.
• yevuard 14y ago
  The difficulty that I have with his linear generalization is that I strongly agree with some points on both sides - sometimes feeling oppositely strongly about two halfs of the same sentence. Another commenter linked to http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2010/05/types-la-chart.html http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2010/05/types-la-chart.html which makes the statement that "the design space is very highly dimensioned, perhaps infinitely so". I suspect that the programmer opinion space is similarly highly dimensioned, and more particularly, that the specific single dimensional analogue that Steve Yegge draws in his post obscures critical features of this topology. If I can come down hard all over the line, then he does not have a good enough mapping from the higher dimensional space. As an aside, using the labels "liberal" and "conservative" inappropriately juxtaposes rather strong emotions in the mix. Hopefully the emotional/visceral reaction was not his intention as a means of ideological persuasion.
• stock_toaster 14y ago
  I found it thought provoking, but I am not sure I agree with the classifications he arrived at. People sure do love putting names on things and classifying things into buckets! I did find it interesting that he considers himself a liberal (both in software and politics), then then goes on to create a "type system" categorization for programmers (and programming languages) to be placed into.
• abecedarius 14y ago
  Forth by this light is batshit liberal, but stereotypically conservative in its early binding. I'm not sure how to take this -- libertarianism comes to mind. Or Sealand. (I used to hack Forth a lot as a teenager.)
• cheddarmint 14y ago
  Is the introduction of a poisonous dichotomy into the engineering zeitgeist a good thing? Consider what this has done for politics.
• kanaka 14y ago
  Good response from chouser (author of "The Joy of Clojure"): http://blog.n01se.net/Clojure-is-not-Software-Conservative.html http://blog.n01se.net/Clojure-is-not-Software-Conservative.h...
• anarchotroll 14y ago
  The bottom line is: everything that cannot be scientifically proved acquires this sort of "religous" attributes. No wonder religions and politics are like that
• grandalf 14y ago
  While I found the article annoying in its oversimplification, I think the real tension Yegge is feeling is about contracts. At a high level, contracts apply to coding standards, and at a low level they apply to interfaces, etc. One may find many aspects of a contract annoying yet still prefer a world where contracts are widespread to a world without contracts. In a sufficiently complex ecosystem contracts make some things easier and some things more difficult. But contrary to Yegge's assertion, it may be that some organizations have a contract that if something breaks, then one of the parties involved does a rewrite/redeploy. This is not a replacement for a contract, as Yegge implies, simply a different contract. One contract might be: "All code must be unit tested". Another might be "If you don't write unit tests and your code works, that's great, but if it fails then prepare to pull an all-nighter if necessary." My guess is that most developers, if asked which kind of methodology was appropriate, would generally pick a methodology that was appropriate for the level of risk involved. If the code is going to manipulate a robot arm holding a knife as it jabs quickly toward the programmer's body, few programmers are going to think that the bugfix/redeploy approach makes sense. But when it's a social site then everyone starts to feel more like a cowboy. I think it is an insult to the professionalism of programmers everywhere to assume that risk decisions are a function of internal constitution rather than a rational risk assessment.
• ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I think the best (only?) point to come out of this essay is that different people have different definitions about what makes code or coding methodology "good". And because of that you can find yourself in an endless argument with someone. Why he dressed it up in political satire (allegory?) I don't know, seemed to me to make his point less forcefully.
• dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  A political philosopher "he ain't." I still get the hype of Steve Yegge, I guess he's a writer only software blog audience world could love. It was soooo loqacious; he doesn't disappoint. :) Nevertheless, I don't know which was worse, the claim about what political conservatism/liberal is or the software one. I guess the software doesn't matter because he's just making it up anyway, but still. Before anyone thinks too highly of this piece, I recommend people study some actual philosophy and humanities. At it's very core this is just an elaborate (not in a good way) dressing up of the static vs dynamic typing discussion; hardly a revolutionary insight. I also don't see how this is "risk" based debate. But in any event, this is just hard to take.
• mathattack 14y ago
  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.
• darkandbrooding 14y ago
  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 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.
• lani 14y ago
  I think a good way to classify the two is :"one group feels that others cannot do what I do" and the other group feels "what I can do anyone can do - right away or with learning/time".. and I think this shows up
• MaysonL 14y ago
  The algebraist/analyst corn cob distinction seems much more valid & meaningful than Yegge's split.
• exim 14y ago
  He should invest more time in writing, to make his posts bit shorter.
• 7952 14y ago
  It depends on context. If you are aware of your own fallibility python is a far more conservative choice than C++. Coding is difficult and the most limiting factor is your own ability. Imagine asking some students to build a Mars rover in 6 months with no experience. It would be far more conservative to use Arduino than ask them to start rolling C code. You are liberal because you are crazy enough to try and build a Mars rover in six months with no experience.
• dmoney 14y ago
  Just as you shouldn't limit yourself to being a "Python programmer" or a "Java programmer", limiting yourself to liberalism or conservativism is a bad idea. You may prefer more liberal or conservative projects, or companies, but that doesn't mean you won't face safety-vs-speed[1] tradeoffs on a regular basis. [1] safety meaning certainty of correctness, and speed meaning speed of development (as opposed to execution)