From: Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@...>
Date: 2006-06-06T12:10:21+09:00
Subject: Re: I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's Future?

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Because I respect you, I'm going to respond as if you're serious.

It may be that you haven't ever worked with the kind of person I'm talking
about. He's the one programmer in a hundred who can do the work of the other
ninety-nine. I probably wouldn't waste him on a Cobol or a VB project. I'd
certainly consider him for Lisp. If I really had to code something in
Brainfuck and had made the decision rationally, then I'd certainly consider
him for that as well. (But wouldn't assembly language be better than BF for
almost any purpose other than demonstrating BF's specialness? And yes, I
would definitely use my superstar on an assembler project.)

I can't speak to your experience. But in mine, the very best of the best are
seduced by the inherent interest of the project, the opportunity to work
with people they respect (and it's HARD to win their respect), and above all
the chance to learn something new. The choice of programming language is
something they care about (I exaggerated upthread), but it's far from the
top of their list.

I asked one of my favorite guys to do a Ruby project three years ago. He had
never heard of Ruby but he took the project. Just as I expected, he was
right up to speed on Ruby almost immediately (essentially in one night) and
did more production-quality work in less time than all of the experienced
Rubyists on the project. With these guys, it's like their brains are
orthogonal to language issues.

>>>Interesting.  I'm always stuck by people who don't get think that
everything is fair game for questioning.

Here, you made two different points ("get" vs "think") as you decided midway
through writing the sentence to pull your punch ;-). I get (and I even
think) that everything is fair game for questioning. But James, think twice
about this: not everything is WORTH questioning.


On 6/5/06, James Britt <james_b@neurogami.com> wrote:
>
> Francis Cianfrocca wrote:
>
> > An individual who
> > really understands software development doesn't pick a programming
> language
> > to concentrate on. He's productive in anything you tell him to use, and
> he
> > doesn't particularly care either.
> >
>
> Wow. That's surreal.
>
> I have a hard time imagining someone who really understands software
> development and yet doesn't care if someone dictates what language is
> used.  And yet can be (equally, one hopes) productive whether working
> with VB, Lisp, Cobol, or Brainfuck.
>
> > Because I'm a businessperson, I'm always struck that people would
> > question the value of achieving greater acceptance for anything.
>
> Interesting.  I'm always stuck by people who don't get think that
> everything is fair game for questioning.
>
>
> --
> James Britt
>
> "Take eloquence and wring its neck."
>   - Paul Verlaine
>
>

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