Ranting Considered Useful

The title of the post is ok, maybe some ranting is useful. But it starts off and continues with narrow assumptions.

First, the Zed quote at the top: "In contrast there are masters in the martial arts who learned their art as a means of survival and became masters in a realistic and hostile environment. We don’t have anyone like this in the programming profession, or at least I haven’t met any."

I guess Zed needs to meet more people ;). I started my IT career as a student working at IBM in 1987. I worked for a department chock full of masters that "learned their art as a means of survival and became masters in a realistic and hostile environment". After 5 years working there, I went on to work for some of the people that pioneered OOP. They were also masters and taught me alot.

The post goes on to declare: "I think that’s probably a prescient assessment of things in the hacker profession right now, and it takes a certain amount of audacity to make such a declaration. Zed Shaw is one of those people who seems to really have his finger on the pulse of things in the tech world"

I think this view only applies when you take into account the surge in growth of web developers since the dot com boom. Even then, masters were born, they just get drowned out by a sea of average developers that never learned software engineering rigor.

Maybe ranting can be useful. But other aspects of the post only hold true if you are only looking at certain categories of developers.

I personally love to read a good rant.

Zed's flaming exit from the Ruby community, however, is not something I would recommend everybody does. Things generally work differently for different people in different situations. (Good luck trying to pin me down on that one!).

Rants come in different shapes and sizes. They also have different targets, but they are usually about blowing off steam.

The history of alt.sysadmin.recovery is full of rants against the cluelessness of users, the stupidity of vendors, the irrational behavior of management and the absurdity of day-to-day tech work. In fact, that's what the whole newsgroup is about.

However, ranting against general situations that (some) people can identify with is different from ranting against specific people. Once you do that things turn into a mud-slinging fest very fast.

I enjoy Zed's rants, but I really could do without the personal attacks he launches. They may or may not have some basis, but I really don't care. In addition, they distract from the technical message he's usually trying to get across in his rants.