Almost every morning when I’m going through my huge collection of RSS feeds, I see a blog post that mentions the beauty of Ruby the language. For years, I’ve dismissed it as weird thing to say. This morning, while reading my RSS feeds, the unavoidable post pops up that mentions Ruby’s beauty, and I think I’ve hit some sort of breaking point.
I’m not a professional on any matters of human psychology, but I know that people prefer things that are beautiful to things that aren’t. At a basic level, I can see why it makes sense; things that are nice to look at are nicer than things that aren’t.
A large part of week is spent writing code of some sort. I write front-end and back-end code. I’ve been dabbling in mobile code as well. As I’m developing my code, I don’t get any sense of beauty from it. Sometimes I’m proud of the conciseness, or the utility of things I’ve written, but I don’t get any pleasure that I can associate with beauty.
While writing this, my friend Bill Mill stopped by to say hello, and he thinks the opposite: there is beauty to be found in well written code. Some languages are more appealing to others because their constructs and idioms make them a greater pleasure to work with. I can see that point, but I still won’t call any code beautiful. This is the best parts of opinions. You can have differing opinions, but respect that their life situations have led them down a different path.
Now, I want to move on what really prompted this post. Seeking beauty in languages might be just one part of a bigger thing. For years, I’ve been working on a hypothesis about “smart people”. For this conversation we will just say that “smart people” are thought workers. As a smart person, you produce intangibles through code, design or something else.
I want to call my hypothesis, “Bubble Theory”. As a disclaimer, I’m quite sure this isn’t a new thought. I’m sure there are tomes of thought on this particular subject. So my Bubble Theory is that smart people enclose themselves in a bubble. This bubble surrounds the person and everything they do. This bubble is physical, but also exists on a psychological level.
I’m sure each and every one of you have seen a smart person in their bubble. Up to and including high school, the bubble expanded as far as it could, and everything inside of the bubble was the smart person’s domain. Smart people are the smartest thing inside of their bubble.
At the college level, the bubble might have found its first bruises. Novice smart people bubbles bump hard against other bubbles. Some bubbles shrink at the expense of others which grow even greater. This is where we first feel the effects of the bubble, but don’t quite recognize what is going on.
After we graduate to the real world, bubbles become interesting. Many smart people know that they are smart. They believe that they can learn anything given enough time and enough study. This might be true. I certainly believe it. We sometimes wield our bubbles naively by assuming that because we think we are smart, others must think as well.
Smart people have to be the smartest person in their bubble, so what happens when another bubbles presses up against it? Or worse tries to smash it in oblivion? In some cases the bubble retracts, but this isn’t true in every case. In some cases, the bubble aggressively tries to expand on its own. This friction point between bubbles is where workplace unrest comes from it. It is where the nasty areas of Ruby vs Python or Java vs C# exist. People don’t like having their bubbles shrunk. It is akin to physical assault in some circles.
There is a secret about bubbles that many smart people don’t care or want to learn. We can make our bubbles permeable. Multiple bubbles can exist in one space. There is room for multiple competing opinions. All it takes to make your bubble permeable is an open mind. You have to understand that ideas and opinions don’t simply exist. They are constantly built using experience and are molded using new experiences constantly. You have to understand you might not like the idea of someone else’s bubble, but you’ll accept it, because you respect it. With enough work, you might be able to absorb other bubbles into your own.
So what can we learn from this? Every where we go there will be smart people. They are shaped by their experiences, and you are shaped by yours. Are your smarts greater than their smarts? Who knows? You’ll have to work on finding that out by yourself. When you do find out, work on working with others rather than trying to be greater. If your bubble is greater, it’ll grow because you’ve accumulated new bubbles rather than bursting them.
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