On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 5:33 AM, Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr>wrote:
On Jan 27, 2012, at 6:13 AM, dimitris chloupis wrote:
This article is really encapsulates the attitude and what is wrong with programming in general. The attitude of superiority and intelligence that seems to plague coders and being the biggest obstacle to progress.
Yes! The "Everyone is dumb but me" phenomenon...
What those "intelligent" people don't get is that complexity is inherently exponential. So even if you are 10 times more intelligent than me (very well possible), it is *completely* irrelevant considering that complexity grows non-linearly.
If you combine this with the notion of Evolution: that it is impossible to creat "the perfect" out of nothing, yet entropy grows when you incrementally improve things... than this has some very serious consequences.
For me the main problem with is the whole aura of "elitism" , what better example than Lisp, where beginners are attacked and be excluded.
We had the same effect in Squeak at the end. No progress, every improvement was actively fighted against, if needed with the nice argument that one can do it even better, and only "the best" is worth for Squeak.
Another thing that "intelligent" people don't get is that critizising is trivial: You can *always* do better, there is no perfection. It's an endless process. This implies that one has to accept and embrace imperfection if one wants to have a future. Else you end up never finishing anything, the death of any incremental progress.
But criticism is essential. How does one identify a mistake if not by criticising? There's a huge difference between constructive criticism (analysis, testing, comparison, evaluation, measurement) and negativity (denial, fear, slander). How can one engineer without measurement, without thought? Being agile doesn't imply being random. Evolution measures, and most harshly; the weaker don't survive.
Pharo was started with the explicit goal to do as many mistakes as possible, as fast as possible.
Marcus
-- Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de
-- best, Eliot