David Heinemeier Hansson step aside, Paul Graham is next to be voted off the island
weblog.raganwald.com
weblog.raganwald.com
Elbowing? Ladder-climbing? Good grief. This is the sort of crap that makes me happy not to be any kind of celebrity.
The only statement here that seems accurate to me is that many people are motivated by envy. Even "Schadenfreude" is the wrong term to use; releasing Arc is hardly any kind of misfortune. And I don't see what Paul Graham and David Hansson have in common, other than that they get mentioned in contentless techfan wordfluff.
A very competitive segment of the marketplace of hot air.
Note that PG and DHH could just as easily have been anyone else, the article just uses them as examples to prove a point.
And frankly I think that a lot of readers of YC news could do good with some insight into psychology and what makes people tick. It is a large part of a startups success.
(note: I don't intend to offend anyone, it is simply humble advice which you may of course ignore at your own discretion)
I wonder how many people just jumped to the download announcement compared to the number who read the Arc essays.
- Didn't you hear? Arc, the language, uses tables in its HTML!
(My god, I would never use a programming language that was ever used to generate tables!)
- The zeroth release of Arc only supports ASCII! What about us EBCDIC users?!
- Arc didn't cure my unsightly dandruff, like I hoped and prayed it would!
- Arc is out and Jesus didn't come back!
- I downloaded Arc and the tarball just sat there in the directory, doing nothing!
- Arc doesn't completely integrate itself with its temporary host language!
- Arc killed my entire village, just as we were about to start our annual Unicode Festival!
- Arc is just a bunch of library functions and syntactic transformations on a parse tree that ultimately compiles to machine code. There is NOTHING new here!
(Did I miss any? ;-)
Yep, the Duke Nukem Forever rewrite is waiting for Arc.
>relentless self-promotion
When and how did that happen?
I mean, I write essays, and since I believe the things I say in them, I am in a technical sense writing things that promote my own ideas, and thus me. But that's true of anyone who writes.
He can't have meant anything so complicated. Here's my theory of what he meant, based on his use of Matz as an example: relentlessly skipping the self-effacing remarks that most people surround their ideas with to help make the medicine go down.
If that's what he means, he's right. I don't do it out of arrogance, though. I skip that kind of stuff partly because it seems too much like a deliberate trick, and partly because it makes sentences longer than they need to be.
I will edit the post, a clarification would strengthen the argument, thanks.
by praising hackers to the point of being demi-gods capable of feats that mere mortals can only dream of you put yourself (and all hackers) on a piedestal. As the parent states this will de facto also include yourself.
most people, being rather small-minded, don't like someone on a piedestal and naturally want to bring them down.
It is very hard to avoid if you are (semi)famous. Especially so if you are also smart.
Tragic but true.
That seems different from praising something one is merely born with, like being English or white or male. You don't find me doing that.
In Matz' case that may be due to him being Japanese. That's the way they generally speak, a kind of etiquette.
Well, he did write about it on paulgraham.com, the #1 site for anything, ever.
I don't have a dog in the fight. I wasn't looking forward to Arc, and I am not going to try it.
But it seems kind of weird to say that people who were disappointed had dubious psychological motives. What if, perhaps, they expected the first released to be stand-alone and that's not what happened? I mean, aren't there lots of ways to be disappointed that don't involve some kind of psychoanalysis and therapy?
I'm sure people are petty and small mammals. But I don't watch Dr. Phill for a reason -- you can make various psycho arguments all day and not really have a lot of anything when you are done. Perhaps the author of _this_ piece is really just a suck-up? There's simply no basis for evaluating one opinion over another. I guess I could say the article is crap, but that would take less words. :)