I will go further. Rejecting our pop culture as being backwards or inferior or sub-optimal is rejecting our humanity, rejecting the things that make us laugh and cry.
I appreciate the author’s sentiment, but everything he says about the industry is tailored towards the feelings and desires of developers. We need to also consider the humanity of our users, who too often have to suffer through a constant onslaught of bugs, errors, weirdly handled corner cases, and general shittiness because we didn’t care enough or couldn’t build something good enough for them to enjoyably use.
Alan Kay’s original quote is more about the lack of context for our ideas in programming, that a pop culture is always “in the now”. It’s hard to look at the convoluted state of web development and not agree with his assessment of what not learning from the past gets us.
But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from] — and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
I don’t think it’s useful or correct to say that programming is a pop culture. It certainly has one.
In fact, it seems to have the same low/highbrow tension as the arts. Take “Write for the classes and live with the masses; write for the masses and live with the classes” and s/write/code/g. [1] Most of the $350k engineers have actually plebeian tastes (because it’s impossible to create a bidding war every 15 months if you’re a Haskeller, but easy if you’re a Java programmer) in technology. The people who buy into programming as an art or craft tend not to be as highly paid as the ones who’ll go with whatever The Business says it wants, and who’ll age themselves out of individual contribution (too much accountability) and into management before 30-35. High-culture lifelong technologists aren’t that way because it pays well; it doesn’t. We’re that way because it’s the only way we can stand to be in this industry. Force us into business-driven enterprise Java, and we’ll do something else (possibly management).
[1] In fact, most people who code for the masses live with the masses. Overwhelmingly so, in fact. You have to be really good to make an average salary while coding “for the classes”, but there are a large number of mediocre programmers who make average salaries, too. (I’d imagine that, likewise, the median payoff for romance/pulp novels isn’t great.)
Programming certainly has a weird pop-culture with shifting trends and style over substance, and that bothers me. It seems that, whenever there’s a tech bubble and we hit Douchebag High Tide, marketing using technology seems to eclipse technology as what seems to matter, because there’s such a huge amount of money in the former (as opposed to a probably more stable, but much smaller, amount of money in Real Technology). I just hope that when this tide goes out (as it will, at some point) it takes out all of the garbage but leaves Real Tech (and salaries for people capable of RT) untouched.
I appreciate the author’s sentiment, but everything he says about the industry is tailored towards the feelings and desires of developers. We need to also consider the humanity of our users, who too often have to suffer through a constant onslaught of bugs, errors, weirdly handled corner cases, and general shittiness because we didn’t care enough or couldn’t build something good enough for them to enjoyably use.
I regret that I have but one upvote to give to my country.
Alan Kay’s original quote is more about the lack of context for our ideas in programming, that a pop culture is always “in the now”. It’s hard to look at the convoluted state of web development and not agree with his assessment of what not learning from the past gets us.
I don’t think it’s useful or correct to say that programming is a pop culture. It certainly has one.
In fact, it seems to have the same low/highbrow tension as the arts. Take “Write for the classes and live with the masses; write for the masses and live with the classes” and
s/write/code/g. [1] Most of the $350k engineers have actually plebeian tastes (because it’s impossible to create a bidding war every 15 months if you’re a Haskeller, but easy if you’re a Java programmer) in technology. The people who buy into programming as an art or craft tend not to be as highly paid as the ones who’ll go with whatever The Business says it wants, and who’ll age themselves out of individual contribution (too much accountability) and into management before 30-35. High-culture lifelong technologists aren’t that way because it pays well; it doesn’t. We’re that way because it’s the only way we can stand to be in this industry. Force us into business-driven enterprise Java, and we’ll do something else (possibly management).[1] In fact, most people who code for the masses live with the masses. Overwhelmingly so, in fact. You have to be really good to make an average salary while coding “for the classes”, but there are a large number of mediocre programmers who make average salaries, too. (I’d imagine that, likewise, the median payoff for romance/pulp novels isn’t great.)
Programming certainly has a weird pop-culture with shifting trends and style over substance, and that bothers me. It seems that, whenever there’s a tech bubble and we hit Douchebag High Tide, marketing using technology seems to eclipse technology as what seems to matter, because there’s such a huge amount of money in the former (as opposed to a probably more stable, but much smaller, amount of money in Real Technology). I just hope that when this tide goes out (as it will, at some point) it takes out all of the garbage but leaves Real Tech (and salaries for people capable of RT) untouched.