I especially disliked the moment when they interrupted the criticizer who was talking that there are a lot of evidences of geniuses existence and highly productive programmers in particular.
And rather than advising to learn from the best programmers, they are advising to learn from ephemeral "community" and trimming ones ego and ambitions.
I don't like the "there are no geniuses" phrase, especially since they then have to back down and say, "Well, it isn't that there are no geniuses -- just that they're extremely rare," which just obscures the point further. The point I think they're trying to make, though, is that the myth of the hero programmer who writes a perfect program and releases it to a world full of unhelpful clods is counterproductive.
If you want to dispute their point, then answer their question: What successful, widely-used project was created entirely by one lone genius?
Thats all the talk is about. And the only reason anyone is arguing with it is the very insecurity the talk seeks to address.
Have you ever seen Linus on usenet? I'd argue that his Real Programmer protective stance towards Linux was more helpful to it taking off than being a really Nice Guy.
> Have you ever seen Linus on usenet?
"Not a total dick" in Internet terms is something like "A little to the left of Mao." However, Linus is also very astute and capable. People will tolerate "does not suffer fools gladly" if they are not a fool, or if they like the person's work.
Every programmer with an ego should ask themselves, "Am I an unjustified asshole?" Consider:
- Do a lot of people mostly like your work?
- Does the cost/benefit of alienating people vs.
shutting down the fools generally work out positively?
(For the community not just for your personal
gratification.)
- Do people complain about you profusely, but for
some reason still grudgingly respect you?
Are you a delusional asshole?
- Do only a select few understand your work, and do you
think even they are all inferiors?
- Are you *always* right?
- Do the people who are trying to do something valuable
generally try to ignore you?
Napster was a bad implementation at the right time.
RoR - credit should be given. Sometimes just getting off your duff and starting something is what the world needs. Motivating many others to refine code into something useful deserves credit.
(EDIT: I am not saying anything was/wasn't a work of genius. I'm just saying it's truly creditable, whatever it was.)
I definitely agree with you on Napster. I am less sure about RoR. It was a a very nice improvement over existing systems, but how much of that was DHH genius and how much was simply due to Ruby providing a better platform upon which to build this particular framework I do not know. It was definitely better than existing alternatives in other scripting languages, but I was not a part of the Ruby world at the time and have no idea where the initial RoR work fit in to the whole Ruby ecosystem at the time.
Why do some people/code get attention and accolades, while others, equally deserving, do not? Timing? Personality? Bluster?
Nitro, another MVC-ish Ruby Web framework released at the same time as Rails, always stuck me as being a much better approach to the same problem, and better engineered (thread safe, less "magic" and munging of core Ruby classes, a form of pipeline transformations somewhat similar to Rack middleware today), but for whatever reasons Rails managed to capture far more attention.
The big win for Rails was not the initial code itself, but in capturing attention and motivating people to contribute, to fix it up, and make it better.
This position is a little oxymoronic since anything successful and widely-used must benefit from the non-zero amount of direct and indirect community feedback. Every project exists in relation to others and if one is superior in some way it's often because the creator decided to improve on something they liked or disliked in another system.
Yup. They wrote Subversion and continue to encourage people to use it.
Perhaps they should tone down their egos and realize that Subversion was not really that great of an idea, and there are now several competing tools that do everything Subversion does, but better.
"The Linux kernel source code used to be maintained without the help of an automated source code management system, mostly because of Linus Torvalds' dislike of centralized SCM systems.
In 2002, Linux kernel development switched to BitKeeper, a SCM system which satisfied Linus Torvalds' technical requirements."
Nearly a decade without a revision control system?
Berkeley DB was certainly old when it was adopted by the SVN project. It's not like the NFS issues with BDB were unknown.
That's why I am suspicious anyone who ever worked for Microsoft, specially when you talk about open-source. You never know when they will send a saboteur.
Subversion is much simpler for people to "get" than other systems. I've been a heavy evangelist of DVCS tools and workflows for a while at work, and it's taken since October (8 months) to get any critical mass behind actually even investigating switching to those from SVN.
Let's face it: Subversion is many many times better than nothing, which is what a ton of people do. Most college graduates in CS or CSE come out of school never having touched version control in my experience, and the ones that have seen it were exposed via open source, not their coursework. Evangelizing Subversion is (really lousy analogy warning!) like convincing people to smoke cigarettes instead of doing illegal drugs. At least it's less bad for them, and the barrier to entry might be a bit lower. When we had a poll of the local Python users group one meeting, "email" was the most popular version control solution, followed by a basic dead heat between svn/bzr/git/hg. The fact that people still view email as a valid answer is far more troubling to me than evangelizing an old and very mature tool instead of one of the new upstarts.
I am glad that CVS died, but it was "replaced" with something not-much-better.