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If you watch the video of the talk on vimeo below, the author addresses this issue head on at the start of his talk. The thesis is that there are many develope
by unoti 12y ago
If you watch the video of the talk on vimeo below, the author addresses this issue head on at the start of his talk. The thesis is that there are many developers that use technologies for capricious reasons such as because other people do it, rather than for solid reasons of engineering.
In my experience, huge swaths of the real world of software development are not wholly reasonable, objective, nor immune to groupthink. There's plenty of posturing and social signaling going on among developers.
- ritchiea 12y agoI'm definitely going to take time to watch his talk because the slides are excellent. And I agree with you wholeheartedly that the real world of software development is not wholly filled with reasonable people that strive for objectivity. Though in a serious conversation about technology adoption I'm not sure the best strategy is to target the unreasonable people. After all, are those even the people you want as advocates of your favorite technology? What you probably want is to win over the reasonable people and let the followers follow. Also, "other people do it" is not a capricious reason for adopting technology. It's not an engineering reason, but there are reasons to follow the crowd. If there is a crowd there will probably be lots of libraries, if there is a crowd there are more people that may do the thankless work of documenting and patching libraries, if there is a crowd there are more people to answer questions on stack overflow. The crowd may not be an engineering reason but it can definitely be a productivity reason.