…or at least talk. I’m appearing at the Epicenter conference in Dublin next week. I’ve got two sessions lined up:
Ending the Era of Patronizing Language Design
I linked, indirectly, to this article the other day and, after reading it again, I agree completely. Well, I agree completely with the notion that we should stop accepting “we didn’t put that feature into the language because you’re too stupid to use it” from language designers.
You really should read the comments accompanying the article, some are wise, many are interesting, unsurprisingly many seem to be commenting on a totally different article.
Now, what this doesn’t mean is that every language should have every feature, it just means that presumed incompetence isn’t an acceptable reason for not having it. Languages need to be designed with taste, discrimination and a desire to facilitate developer productivity.
For too long we have been told by programming language designers that we should eat our steak with a spoon because knives are too dangerous.
What sort of features am I thinking of here? Well, Java is a major culprit of the “you’re too stupid” mindset.
Automatic memory management : This isn’t the sort of feature I’m talking about. This is an enabling feature, something added to the language to help developers. Does it have drawbacks? Sure it does, there are times when direct-to-the-metal can be useful. But a decision was made here to facilitate in one area and compromise in another.
Operator overloading : Can it be used for evil? Sure. So can talcum-powder.. that doesn’t mean we should ban it and force our babies to suffer from trench-nappy-region. There are many cases where operator overloading makes sense and its absence in Java is painful. Exhibit 1 ‘BigDecimal’.
Immutable Strings : Another case of “not what I’m talking about”. Mutable Strings can be useful and powerful, but not having them brings advantages too. This was a conscious decision.
No meta-model : Without a meta model programmers dive into byte code manipulation and magical “doesn’t work like anything else in the language” constructs like DynamicProxy. Can meta-programming be hard and weird? Sure, so is physics. Shall we ban that? It isn’t the same, I hear you cry. You’re damn right it isn’t. Those guys created the atom bomb, and we still let/encourage/train/pay people do it. Heck we teach physics to CHILDREN. There are times in this world, when nuclear fission is just plain useful.
The list goes on.
Sharp vs. Blunt Instruments: “If you want your team to produce great work and take responsibility for their decisions, give them powerful tools.”
(Via Glenn Vanderburg: Blog.)
Hallelujah brother Glen. Everyone say, “praise the power”. C’mon now, say it with me, “praise the power”.
Jack Cough on Software: Scala over Ruby - My Debate Ends: This article struck a chord with me today.
I spent most of today flipping back and forward between Ruby and Scala. I’m working on a project where I’m writing some Ruby talking over sockets and streams and files and I needed something JVM flavoured on the other end.
The JVM end was just some driver code that was going in the bin. I had IDEA open because I was using it to write the Ruby side ( at which it is fantastic ) and a simple Scala script seemed easiest - that’s where my head has been recently so it seemed most natural.
Things did not go so well - the embedded Ruby that I was using was badly mangled and had chunks of the standard libraries missing. I ended up spending the day bashing away at various ways of solving the problem. With each change of direction I had to rework both the Ruby and the Scala side of the solution. I noticed something odd.
Version 1.0 was a bit faster to write on the Ruby side. I’m a better Ruby programmer than I am a Scala programmer, but that aside I feel that it was slightly easier to express the problem than in Scala. But as the day went on the Scala code became easier to work with whilst the Ruby code had good and bad patches. Significant refactorings or changes of approach often led to runtime errors in the Ruby code. This wasn’t a problem in the Scala code. The IDE, compiler and type system caught most of the problems well before I got the application running.
Have I abandoned Ruby forever? No, it is near and dear to my heart and it is still better for bashing out scripts for which there will be no version 2. The benefits of Scala didn’t become apparent until 4 to 6 hours into the piece.
Some questions come to mind:
How well would the Scala fare long term? I don’t know. It is possible that I won’t understand it tomorrow and that every day will have a 4 to 6 hour ramp up time. But I don’t think so. I think I’d reap more benefits tomorrow than I did today.
How would Java have fared? I worked on a similar problem the day before and I used Java. It was a pain in the patooty in many ways, but I’m not sure if it comes above or below the Ruby version though. Many of the same characteristics that Scala has were apparent in that session too. I am sure that I found the Scala experiment more productive - despite the fact that I’m a much, much better Java programmer than I am a Scala or Ruby programmer.
I’ve been a fan of Ruby for a long, long time. If I had a real world problem to solve, and language was no barrier .. I’d probably choose Ruby, unless there was a solid reason not to.
Why then do I spend so few of my hacking hours poking at Ruby code?
I think it is because my hacking hours are spent twiddling with new shiny things or working through the same old exercises[1] in different ways, rather than trying to achieve something. As I mentioned a few days ago, I think it is irresponsible and unfair to release an app or library to the OS community unless you’re willing to support it, and I’m not, so I rarely build big projects. For the most part, how I solve the problem is more interesting to me than the problem.
I suppose it comes down to - I rarely use Ruby because I’m rarely trying to solve a problem as efficiently as I can.
[1] Uncle Bob Martin’s “Agile Software Development : Principles Patterns and Practices” contains an interesting little console programming problem that I’ve worked through in half a dozen different languages.
I’ve just watched Zed Shaw’s THERE WILL BE PORN: 10 Dangerous Ideas Nobody Should Implement which thankfully contains neither porn, nor ten ideas. He sings, he plays music, he insults people he likes, he has some number of ideas that people should never implement which is less than ten that he talks about and he swears a great deal.
You know the old chestnut whereby both art and porn are hard to describe but “I’ll know it when I see it”. Well, this is neither. But for some reason I enjoyed watching it.
There’s a lot of history you have to have lived through to really understand it; you’ll know if you know. If you do, give his farewell speech a listen. If you don’t … he plays a mean guitar.
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