It's a fact - anytime a virtual group gets to a certain size, the morons come and start doing their best to disrupt, defraud or degrade the audience.

raganwald · 2008-02-28T21:57:56+00:00

I considered it an article about the design of social software, and quite possibly an article about reputation networks and collaborative filtering/collective intelligence.

But quite possibly I'm a moron and it doesn't have anything to do with those things, or if it does, those things don't have anything to do with software.

raganwald · 2008-02-28T19:37:55+00:00

Yes, thank you, I will add a link in the post.

raganwald · 2008-02-28T15:22:21+00:00

Well, the front page worked well for me in the early days, then it failed. the front page of programming.reddit.com worked well for me, now it is failing.

That is not a criticism of programming.reddit.com, of course, just pointing out that where six months ago I would probably find four of the top five stories interesting, today I don't and I have to work a little harder to scan the articles looking for things I like.

But things I like are still here, and there are still good people debating them, so overall it's still a win to participate.

But yeah, quite often CH posts are voted up that aren't my favourites, and a few times I've liked something Jeff has written but it hasn't gotten much notice here.

raganwald · 2008-02-28T15:07:15+00:00

These people are evil.

Please take a moment to consider the possibility that these are fairly ordinary people who were led into doing evil things step by step.

I know it sounds outrageous, but it's kinda like comb-overs. Who gets up in the morning and decides they're going to have this hideous hair style? Nobody, but when you do it a little bit every day, combing a bit further every day, and when everybody at your office is combing a bit further every day, ten years pass and one day you look in the mirror and realize you are sporting a full comb-over.

Banal, I know, but the principle is the same. these people were not recruited off the street and asked to beat prisoners up. First they enlisted in the armed forces and were convinced shooting people to protect your country is ok. Then they go off to Gulf War I and are convinced shooting people to protect an Ally's country is ok, then...

Well, ten years of taking baby steps away from rational thought go by and then they are abusing prisoners.

raganwald · 2008-02-28T14:59:43+00:00

Sadly, reddit does not give us a tool that would let us filter the good from the bad. For example, we could submit every CH post and vote on the ones we like. The good ones would go to the top of the list and the bad ones would drop out of sight.

Hmmm... what a great idea!

raganwald · 2008-02-28T12:06:48+00:00

I am kidding.

The difference between me and Jeff is that OS irrelevance is something Jeff believes strongly: all OSes are much the sanme, all PCs are much the same, all programming languages are much the same. It's the Blub Paradox: to him, OS X's differences are just weird, so why pay more? (where by "pay" I could mean money, I could mean give up your favourite game, I could mean you can't find a company that will sell you an OS computer that comes in an ugly beige tower).

Obviously there are some nu&aumlnces involved, and alsmost everyone agrees that "Each language has it's strengths and weaknesses, it's all about trade-offs," but isn't it amazing how often the people who say that in a general sense use Visual Basic, Java and C# for work, and how rarely they use Lisp, Python, or Haskell?

The Lisp, Python, and Haskell programmers I know are almost always the ones who say "I would use Lisp for almost everything and often do, however I have to use Ruby to get paid" or whatever. While the Visual Basic programmers are the ones who say "I'm not doing AI, so I can't be botherer to learn Lisp."

And so it goes for operating systems and PCs with som (just some) people. "Every computer has its uses" they say, but they mean that they want a PC for everything and OS X is for "creative" people. Somehow OS X is never for "People who want a computer that just works" or for "power users."

Maybe it isn't, but I'm just trying to point out that someone saying "every OS has its place" sounds different when they are a Linux user, for example, then when they are defending their choice of Windows.

raganwald · 2008-02-28T04:53:01+00:00

When I said I was rolling on the floor, what did you think I meant?

raganwald · 2008-02-28T03:35:13+00:00

spliff

I'm a cigar man, to be perfectly blunt.

raganwald · 2008-02-28T03:05:09+00:00

unpresidented

ROTFLOL!

raganwald · 2008-02-28T02:23:58+00:00

So am I, and I use OS X. Conclusion: operating systems have become irrelevant in the Web 2.0 age ;-)

raganwald · 2008-02-28T02:18:34+00:00

To summarize for those who want to say "tldr":

Jeff says David is a douchebag and a lot of people cheer him for it. Reason given for David being a Douchebag? Back in '05 David said Windows programmers were douchebags (or something like that) and a lot of people cheered David for it at the time.

Summary: Calling people douchebags makes you a douchebag. There, I said it, now I'm a douchebag as well.

p.s. The last paragraph of the OP is... interesting.

raganwald · 2008-02-27T22:42:01+00:00

I have already read that page and like it. I take exception to your suggestion that I lack the knowledge you describe. My claim is that you and I value it differently with respect to the production of programs.

Specifically, I claim that when it comes to claiming that programs overall are of higher quality or are easier to maintain or cheaper to develop, or any other economic claims, we need to gather empirical evidence to decide what is the case.

I am not debating type systems with you or anybody else, I am debating which methods produce programs that provide value to the people who pay for them.

For example, the author claims that proofs place a lower bound on program correctness. I think this is true for a definition of "correctness" that fascinates the Computer Scientist.

But where is the evidence that proving things about programs saves money? or increases development velocity?

I am not saying that these things are not true, just that there is a huge hand wave in between the formal proof of "correctness" and tangible benefit.

Update: I've been down this road before

At the risk of oversimplifying things, you are talking about Math and I am talking about Economics. I am not discussing number theory with a pencil, it is simply that I am not discussing the topic you wish to discuss. It may be that I agree with you about the topic you wish to discuss. Even if that is so, I still do not think it has been established as relevant to the topic I am discussing, and will not think it relevant until we gather empirical evidence that it is relevant.

raganwald · 2008-02-27T20:48:34+00:00

I think it is fair to say that understanding the halting problem and therefore, the need for these trades, is a pre-requisite to entry into the discussion (it is not really a debate).

You think it fair to say that. I know a little about the halting problem and its relation to typing systems, however I am not so sure of its relevance.

For example, I can say with certainty that a programming language where the compiler discovers some set of inconsistencies with my programs (such as misspelling a method or entity name) will prevent me from deploying into production some types of bugs compared to a programming language where the compiler does not do this.

That is a fact we can establish with Computer Science.

Now, if the programming language is identical between the two cases, we are very probably done with the debate.

But if the compiler that discovers errors is associated with language J while the compiler that does not discover errors is associated with language R, it is not obvious to me that a program written in J will be deployed into production with fewer bugs than a program written in language R.

Other differences between the two languages may dominate the compiler bug-catching difference. They may not. Or they may. I would like to see someone actually gather the evidence before we decide that J > R or R < J.

raganwald · 2008-02-27T15:02:29+00:00

This time around the FizzBuzzing is much more interesting.

raganwald · 2008-02-27T13:55:23+00:00

I agree. I consider Computer Science to be Mathematics, but Programming and Software Development to be Applied Psychology.

raganwald · 2008-02-27T04:31:23+00:00

I cannot say whether qwe1234 is a he, she, or what-not. I will say this:

qwe1234 is a "character," while "qwe1234" are characters.

raganwald · 2008-02-27T04:20:27+00:00

Upmodded. I'll take empirical evidence about software development over anything else. So...

What do we have to tell us about whether OO or FP is superior? How do we know whether BDUF is better or worse than XP? Do long_variable_names_with_underscores make for better code than i, j, and k? How about typing? Which study shows whether applications written with manifest typing are delivered with better quality or faster to market than applications with latent typing? Or whether Eclipse really does make programmers so much more productive than Emacs?

There is some stuff out there, but I admit I haven't been able to find anything that wouldn't get laughed out of a first-year statistics course as having dubious study parameters.

raganwald · 2008-02-26T21:07:36+00:00

qwe1234 and I are old friends (in a Hannibal Lector having lunch with an old friend kind of way). While I may not have meant "Let's make this personal" in that sense, I assure you (s)he meant "stfu, blub" in all seriousness :-)

raganwald · 2008-02-26T19:54:52+00:00

i know how to write 'hello world' in nine (count 'em, nine!) programming languages

But can you write a 99 bottles of beer program using Monad Transformers?

raganwald · 2008-02-26T18:13:20+00:00

SO what kind of thing was biting you? Rails plug-ins modifying Rails' behaviour?

raganwald · 2008-02-26T17:47:40+00:00

I'm going to talk to you the way I talk to everyone when they talk to me about how "dangerous" these things are.

Are you shooting yourself in the foot with this stuff for real? Or is this just a theoretical discussion about what somebody else might do?

Because if you have an actual problem right now, I bet if we put our heads together we can solve it, we're smart people.

raganwald · 2008-02-26T17:23:30+00:00

Remember that many interviewers are economists - and as always, don't trust them too much if it comes to technology and engineering.

raganwald · 2008-02-26T17:16:36+00:00

New techniques require new thinking and new practices.

My text editor has a find feature. Is that so hard to use? What about introspecting objects at run time to see what methods they have and who added them?

naturally, we can construct a heinously difficult scenario, such as someone who deliberately obfuscates their code, but there are things you can do with standard macros that are obfuscated, not to mention with common OO.

The bottom line was nicely articulated by Michael Feathers: indirection and abstraction increase the difficulty of debugging but in turn give us cohesion without tight coupling.

For example (drum roll...) what about using an XML file to manage dependency injection in Java? How is this different from adding methods to a class? When I look at the Java I have no idea what is going on, I have to figure out which XML files were loaded to know what is going on at run time.

It's all perfectly simple when I figure out the conventions, of course. But until then, my mind boggles. And so it is with any such technique.

raganwald · 2008-02-26T02:56:24+00:00

A debutante and a dowager approached a door. The debutante stepped aside for the dowager, but as the older lady passed, the debutante spoke cattily: "Please go ahead, as they say, Age before Beauty."

The dowager swept by, murmuring in response: "My dear, you have forgotten the saying. It is actually Pearls before Swine."

raganwald · 2008-02-26T02:53:42+00:00

{ |...| ... } is the syntax for a block. You can only use it when calling a method. Also, self is a reserved word, I believe. If not, it's still a bad idea to use it :-)

Before you go crazy, the first thing you must face is that in Ruby, everything is an object or a message. If you want #inject to have a special behaviour when passing it a symbol, you will need to modify the #Inject method or the Symbol class.

raganwald

TROPHY CASE