Old Dudes That Talk Small and Carry Big Sticks
40. (with egg) Visual Studio, Ruby on Rails, and Old Dudes Who Know Smalltalk
I really love Old Dudes Who Know Smalltalk! I was nurtured, sculpted, and brainwashed by Old Dudes Who Know Smalltalk from my very first day as a professional programmer, and they universally “get it”. Young whipper-snappers out there, take note: if you ever here (sic) some Old Dude say the words “in Smalltalk you could blah blah blah” or “In VisualWorks you could yada yada”, spend as much time with this person as possible. You will learn more from them about software development than the Young Dude who only wears black and thinks that the bash shell is “too bloated”.
Oh… I am so feeling the love. One old dude benefit is in recognizing useful language features. I immediately fell in love with Groovy after seeing it’s Closures implementation. (By coincidence, I’m listening to Jason explain Closures on a WebDevRadio interview. He wants to whip out his Mac and show you, but… it’s radio). Likewise, being interested in tools to better exploit processor concurrency, I’ve been studying Erlang and have to say that I’m really disappointed with the bulky syntax. It just isn’t very readable, IMO. I much prefer the clean syntax of Scala.
Update: Merlyn has similar issues with Erlang readability, though attributes it to style rather than language syntax. I have to admit, the solution gives me hope.
One day there will be statements about the Old Dudes Who Know Ruby. I don’t really expect to be around for that one, but trust me; it will happen.
Fred, I appreciate this as well. When I was at RubyConf last week, I had a conversation with one of those whipper snappers; he believes that a certain open source deployment framework is a big pile of over-engineered junk, far too complex for anyone to get any value from it. I totally disagree with that person. I believe he suffers from an over-active pragmatic gland. Reminds me of the fence in the middle of the field…
I ‘grew up’ in a Smalltalkr’s (forgive me; I needed to put a bit of hip in that) Studio. I wouldn’t change that for a million command line scripts with no tests any day.
Comment by Adam Williams — November 12, 2007 @ 10:35 pm
Your Smalltalkr is indeed priceless. I wish every young developer could have a mentor like Ken early on.
Comment by fmedlin — November 13, 2007 @ 1:57 pm