Those who I work with know I don't spend much time online interacting with my fellow programmers. Sometimes I regret this. The websites we have today for interaction are vastly superior to the ones we used to have. The web software itself is better, but the content is also much better. You have multi-disciplinary coders, working with many languages, and many architectural patterns all sharing one common web forum these days. Unfortunately, these cats seem to be in a perpetual flame war.
The problem is that most of the heavy users of these sites are beginners. They ask a lot of questions, because they don't have much knowledge or experience. Intermediate pros answer these questions. They give very stereotypical platform-centric, ethnocentric advice. You get rote Java advice from Java programmers. You get rote VB advice from Visual Basic programmers. Same thing goes for all the languages. These guys do not know or understand each other's approaches. No VB programmer is particularly honest about, or even aware of the flaws in his game plan. Same is true for Java programmers, C++ programmers, C# programmers, Python programmers, etc. Ethnocentrism reigns supreme all over these forums.
Very few of the guys on these forums have more than 10 years of experience. Most of us stop coding before we reach age 10 as professional coders. We get kicked up the chain of command. This is what makes a brilliant guy like Robert C. Martin so amazing. He has been coding for 39 years. He just never stopped coding. This is a deeply experienced polyglot programmer who really knows the answer to the question "Why?" because he has seen the full evolution of software development. He lived through every movement.
Recently, Uncle Bob had a smack down with the dudes at StackOverflow.com. I was rather appalled. The Stackoverflow gang wrote the site in C# and the Microsoft MVC framework. Ergo, they are members of my most recent tribe. I was shocked to see such good members of my tribe speak so ignorantly.
It was pretty clear to me that the very brilliant young entrepreneurs at StackOverflow.com did not use the SOLID techniques Uncle Bob advocates. It is also clear that they felt threatened by the advent of SOLID, because an acceptance of these techniques would marginalize the StackOverflow.com software itself. They took Uncle Bob to task for preaching SOLID. As you listened to these podcasts, forum posts, and blogs, it became clear that the noise coming from the stackoverflow gang was driven of their own personal insecurities about the status and longevity of StackOverflow.com rather than the validity of Uncle Bob's SOLID principles. They didn't want to talk about SOLID. They wanted to talk about owning a business.
Uncle Bob knows this. He did a caper Podcast with Scott Hanselman in which the recapped this smack down. Although he didn't explicitly say it in this way, Uncle Bob gave me every impression that he knew he was dealing with young and insecure entrepreneurs floating on their very first life-boat on the high-seas of commercial SAS.
Older, veteran, multi-lingual programmers with 14 years of experience and 4 or 5 major languages worth of professional experience have a hard time finding people to talk too. Programmers are rare. Veterans are scarce. Multi-lingual veterans are seldom seen. I wonder if it is possible to form a club where the scarce 2000+ of us might get together on line. We would have to restrict membership quite sharply. No monolingual or mono-platform guys allowed. If you are Unix only, you are out. If you are Mac only, you are out. If you are Windows only, you are out. If you are C/C++ only, you are out. If you are VB.NET only, you are out. etc.
If such a forum existed, it would be possible for serious and objective software engineers to discuss the patterns and practices of the various languages and platforms free from the sort of fundamentalism that drives so many in our field. That would be a wonderful thing. Can you imagine an objective discourse on the strengths and weakness of software systems? Could be very beneficial.
But you just can't discuss the pros and cons of Islam with Osama Bin Laden. Neither can you discuss the pros and cons of VB.NET with a mono-lingual VB programmer. Neither can you convince a Java programmer that Microsoft uses its own software to write MSN or Microsoft.com. They think must be running on Unix because Windows doesn't scale.
The last time I had a "conversation" online, it was with a young Java programmer. I am sure he would have embarrassed James Gosling. I was doing a comparison of Java, C# and Scala. He quickly got belligerent. He seemed to think I was unfairly putting Java down, by not recognizing it's innate superiority to C# and Scala. His response was to resort to mocking derisiveness.
The lad didn't seem to know that Java generics aren't real generics. He didn't seem to know that Java lacks full lexical closures. He was sure it couldn't be important if Java didn't have it. He didn't know that closures have been burning topic #1 in Javaland for some 2 years now. He didn't know what an event is. He didn't know what a delegate is. He didn't know what a Scala trait is. He was quite sure Scala could not replace Java because it could never be as cross-platform as Java! (!!!) He was very rude & insulting in the process. Young men like to play king of the hill, and they want to beat you down.
I can recall the bad days of 1994 when I was first doing a bit of professional work on the market. I was very insecure. I didn't know if I could make it in life doing this particular line of work. I didn't know how long it would last. I did know the other options were worse. But still, this profession might not be for me. One thing I knew: Borland and Pascal were my only life-line. An attack on these agents was an attack upon my livelihood. I took any objective criticism as an attempt to sink my ship.
I am sure that the young Java lad was in the same boat. He is probably working on his first pro assignment. He knows some Java and nothing else. Any objective critique of Java is immediately interpreted as an attempt to sink his financial lifeboat. He must respond vigorously. Most other members of the tribe feel this way.
Still, you can imagine that a guy like me dislikes dealing with a young guy like that. He can't discuss the pros and cons of his system. He just isn't experienced enough. At this point, he would not be willing to be honest about it. He really can't hear what you say because fear of financial collapse.
This is the rant of a lonely old programmer who has nobody to talk too. Many of these points are being refreshed in my mind day by day as I learn Scala. Many programmers around me, particularly those I work with, have no idea why I would ever want to learn a language like Scala. They believe I am letting down the Microsoft faction.
What these young fellows don't know or understand is that you can't get married for life if you are a programmer. Computer languages are not women. You do not wed a language or vendor as you would a woman. Even if you did, languages and vendors die, ergo in death shall you part. Neither are languages religions. You do not experience a religious conversion experience and become a programmer of language XYX.
