Gears Within Gears

I know that I’m late to the party here, that all of the cool kids have had accounts for what seems like Internet-decades, and that I can do nothing but add my voice belatedly to an already rapturous chorus; nevertheless, forgive my enthusiasm: GitHub rules, it is worth joining, and, once signed up, it took only a week for my workflow to be forever improved. I am, in short, a believer.

• It’s never been easier or more convenient to contribute to other open source projects.
• It’s never been easier to work remotely.
• It’s never been easier to track the progress of projects and developers you’re interested in.
• Unicorns! Rainbows! Puppies!

Over the next few weeks I’ll gradually be migrating all of my projects over to it, and I encourage you to do the same.

Scheme, a variant of Lisp popular in academic settings, has no download link on its extremely minimalist home page. If you click Implementations, it will list about fifty and recommend about ten. Visit the Ruby homepage and you are presented with a modern, polished, attractive site and a large, friendly Download Ruby link.

Marketing isn’t always about advertising. If you believe in a product, present it to the world in a way that makes it easy for others to believe in. It’s easy to be cynical about appearances, but they are, here and now as they have ever been, important. This principle is extended deeply into the Ruby language itself. From a technical standpoint, Ruby does very little that other languages don’t, but the metaprogramming hooks it makes available to users are straightforward and user-friendly and make its users feel immediately powerful. The elaborate contortions (do watch the presentation if you can, it’s awesome) that the language itself must go through in order to provide a convenient interface to the user doesn’t detract from the net result. Simplexity sells.

Ruby and, now, Rails have been around for long enough that it seems, at least to me, that most people who were ever going to have an opinion on it now do so. But accusations of hype are and always have been overblown; I would go so far as to call that particular brand of cynicism a kind of intellectual laziness convenient to those don’t understand a phenomenon and don’t particularly want to. Regardless of whether or not Ruby and/or Rails are here to stay (and I think they are, but then, I’m an optimist), it would be foolish to ignore the lessons here.

G. K. Chesterton:

[T]he truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

It’s easy to slag somebody else’s code. Sometimes it’s almost impossible not to. Nobody likes a big hairy mess, and if you’re the software development world’s equivalent of a neat freak, as I am, the reaction can be immediate and visceral.

Certainly not all code is great. I find good writing an apt comparison: styles differ, and reasonable people differ in their preferences, but there exist some pretty clearly-defined differences between good writing and bad. Books and articles are written to be read by humans, and good code should be too, but because code has a second, overarching goal of executability and functional completeness, the kinds of structure, syntax, and flow that are so important to a good book tend to fall by the wayside. In code, expressing intent to humans is nice; in writing, it’s everything. Not every line of code receives that kind of care and attention, and when you find yourself staring the kind of tangled mess that promises whole weeks of fun to tease apart it’s hard not to lay a finger of blame on its human stewards. I myself prefer a kind of good-natured mockery when I stumble across something particularly egregious and a have a good guess about the person¹ (or, more likely when pairing, persons) responsible.

Even at ThoughtWorks, where we all like to think that we’re pretty decent coders², I haven’t been thrilled with every line of code code I’ve stumbled across. I find the above quote helpful because, substituting ‘social institution’ for ‘line of code’, it points the way to humility: people generally do things for a reason, and they may be drawing from painful experience that you yourself haven’t had the benefit of, not to mention the kinds of tight deadlines that we’ve all been under before. Resist the urge to rip it all apart until you understand it well enough to approach it with respect and humility.

¹ Sarnacke. Kidding! Or am I? Hmm.

² On our writing I plead the fifth.