Giles Bowkett summons monsters | Hacker News Reader

Giles Bowkett summons monsters

raganwald.posterous.com

101 pointsColinWright17 comments

I like this post very much. HN discussions often end up being about minor details rather than the overarching point, and I think that's unfortunate.

Those details are often things that are a matter of preference. There are good and bad arguments for both sides, and most of those arguments have been made many, many times already. Different people will hear the same exact arguments, draw on their own experiences and values, and come to different conclusions. And that's okay.

Which isn't to say that details are always irrelevant: just that you're missing a lot when you focus on the details to the exclusion of the larger point. Like in this post: it doesn't really matter whether or not Giles is baiting people intentionally. It may be true, it may be false, but it's not the point. The point is that people are responding as if he's doing it anyway.

This is a common failing of... our kind, I suppose. Too often we tend to get stuck on details and miss the bigger picture.

My favorite example are analogies. Every single time one is made, it results in a string of other comments attempting to correct it or improve it. "It's like driving a car down the freeway without any wheels"... "No, it's really more like driving a tractor trailer on a country road without wheels and a windshield". Every. Single. Time. And I'm as guilty of this as anyone.

It often makes for frustrating reading, especially when you're already familiar with the argument and aware of the most common mental traps, but have to read them over and over again trying to get to the good stuff.

This article contains a good observation: he wraps his key idea in layers of link-bait and nerd-traps, shallow but emotionally charged ideas that side-track all but the strongest minds.

Hey, this idea is my Intellectual Property! I invented it to keep the morons at bay during Usenet's Eternal September, beginning with AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe's addition to Usenet in 1993. I always tried to put "lightning rod" prose into any Usenet article to divert the idiots into responding with idiocy. Only people with some knowledge can pass up a "lightning rod" and deal with the real issues.

In many of his usenet articles Eric Naggum admits to putting traps for 'stupid people' in his posts. Anyone who's read any amount of Naggum rants knows this had interesting results. For instance, people would 'suggest' he use more polite language, and in response would get flamed.

It's as old as Plato's Republic; it's hilarious how people (starting with Socrates's fictional debate partners) get sidetracked into "no, if the city were like that you would need [...] for it to work" while forgetting the fact that it's just a metaphor for exploring justice.

Fun facts! I first read Plato before I was 16, and first read Plato in the original Greek before I was 20. Those are the monkey see, monkey do years.

However, although I think Raganwald is basically onto something, it's not entirely deliberate. It never occurred to me that after complaining how Bundler breaks convention over configuration, people would tell me that configuration options are the solution to "bundle exec foo."

This is the kind of thing Reg might refer to as a trap, but there's a simple general principle that generates traps. Trace your idea from a specific to a principle and watch how few people can follow you there.

Also, I've actually blogged that Alan Kay quote many times, and I try to hammer the point whenever I have a chance, because I think it's one of those overlooked bits of genius that really helps anyone who gives it the thought it deserves. For instance: anything which is driven by fashion is going to go in cycles. What does that mean?

Clothing of course is driven by fashion. Lots of fashion designers raid thrift shops to get new ideas from old clothes. Fashion drives music. Bands re-record new versions of old songs all the time, dance music constantly samples and recycles itself, rappers sample old grooves and bring them back to new life and put them in front of new audiences. So maybe if you work in an industry driven by fashion, a pop culture, you'll want to dig into the past and find "new" ideas to steal. Like the revolutionary idea that GUIs should use MVC, for example. The big "new" idea in client-side JavaScript is literally the oldest idea there is when it comes to UI.

I mentioned this in another thread, connected to my actual rant, but I'll say it here again: I predicted JS MVC (eg Backbone) in 2005 or 2006, and built my own crappy version in 2007 or 2008. It's not magic future genius powers. When you know it's fashion, and you know fashion is cyclical, you can just watch the wheel turning.

But I don't think the Alan Kay thing is the only thing in there worth thinking about. I basically put in stuff for arguers to argue about and stuff for thinkers to think about. Some people love arguing and hate thinking! That's not my style, but I don't mind if they have fun too.

It's always nice to see people keeping the fine art of old school usenet-style trolling alive in these confused times.

Note to raganwald: Harlan is still alive, not suffering fools kindly, if at all.

“I used to smoke drugs. I still do, but I used to, also.”—Mitch Hedberg.

Yeah, I see how saying he “used to” makes it sound like he’s dead or had total personality replacement surgery. I’ve changed that, thanks.

From my perspective Rails popularized (perhaps even normalized) tdd, which I think is probably a significant contribution to programming culture.

Or were high-ceremony Java enterprise folk doing tdd all along and rails just adopted it? I don't know but I suspect they were at best pretending to

high-ceremony Java enterprise folk - is that a way of not including a "lightning rod" or layers of linkbait and trolling? Because I think of the work of "Java enterprise folk" in different terms. "Bloatware", "boilerplate", "marching morons" and a number of other more derogatory terms come to mind.

People were doing TDD for sure (at least I can tell so in .Net and Java) before Rails was released.

IMO though, Rails moved this from "something done by advanced programmers" to "something done most of the time".

The most brilliant contribution for me was: the migrations.

Great, now every HN commenter is going to try to put a trap in all of their comments. I wonder where the line between traps and trolling lies.

There is no line, trapping is trolling. The result as far as HN is concerned is the same: High noise-to-signal ratio in the discussions.

Ah. This clears things for me. I can now go back to some of the blogs I used to read but stopped because I thought they were switching sides wantonly, when they were actually forcing me to choose one...

I know and respect Reg. I've emailed and tweeted quite a lot with him over the years, long been a fan of his writing, and hung out in person in Toronto a few times. He's a great guy. But this rambling theory of his highlights a problem I've noted before, his tragic addiction to smoking banana peels. Although I appreciate the time taken to think about my writing, Reg's "conspiracy theory" amounts to nothing more than the fever dreams and hallucinations that smoking banana peels so often induces. Parents, warn your children about banana peels. I would go so far as to say don't even let them have a banana sunday or a strawberry-banana smoothie. It's just not worth the heartbreak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananadine ;)

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