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by Mark Masterson.
Original Post: Reg gets a little too close with that razor, I think...
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Derek Sivers post stirred up one of those blogosphere teapot tempests (which I suppose was inevitable, given the twin demons of Rails and PHP that he invoked). I had resolved not to comment on it anymore, having already posted about it once, but then Reg went and wrote about it, and, as usual, pretty much nailed it. Somewhat more unusually, however, and despite the fact that I agree with his core argument completely, I find myself being quite unhappy with Reg's post. The reason for that is also the reason I was going to refrain from any further exposition on the topic -- I find Reg's post to be too disparaging of Derek as a person. And that's despite the fact that Reg is a model of politeness and restraint, compared to some of the vitriol I've seen spewed in Derek's direction in the last two days.
I find that unfortunate. Frankly, I don't care if Derek is a rocket scientist, an idiot, or both (I would argue that you can't make any kind of judgement about that issue on the basis of this post of Derek's alone). Sharing this kind of "failure story" with us is useful in and of itself. For exactly the same reason, I meant to link to (and sadly, let it get too far back in my queue and then forgot about it) Reg's failure story (which, for the record, is vastly more interesting and helpful than Derek's).
We often learn much more from failures than we do from successes, ergo: failure stories are often more valuable. If people are courageous enough to share such experiences with us, we should reward them, not punish them by telling them how stupid they are.
For the record, I interpreted Derek's post such that:
It seemed that Derek had grokked that the root cause of his problems had been his own errors of judgment, not Rails or PHP or any combination of the two
Derek took the opportunity to do a little musing on the isomorphism of two differing Turing complete PLs.
Interestingly, Reg doesn't seem to have had the same interpretive experience as I did. In particular, he didn't see Derek grokking his own culpability, and so seemed compelled to point it out to him. Having decided to do that, there was probably no way to achieve that goal without implying something about Derek that's not entirely flattering. Of the reasons that Derek lists for his decision, Reg says "All of the reasons are technical reasons, reasons why he thinks Rails failed him." Except that's not true -- reason 7 (and arguably, reason 2) are not technical issues. Moreover, taken together, reasons 7 + 2 point the blame for the failure at Derek's chain of reasoning, not at Rails.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into both Derek's post and Reg's critique of it. Reg's critique seems focused on the "software as spec" fallacy of Chad Fowler's post, and that's arguably not an insight that Derek expresses in his post. Sigh. I dunno.
Words are nasty buggers. Hard to use, hard to understand. Dangerous. People will read what they want to read, interpret what they want to, hear what they want to hear. Nobody ever really understands anybody else. Dangerous stuff. Which is why we have to try and be careful with words -- they are the sharpest of razors, and their cut can hurt.
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