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Comment by davidbalbert

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Comment by davidbalbert

One thing I think we could have done better with Code Words is added short bios. Bios add context, which is lacking here. Here's R0ml's bio from 2006[^1]:

r0ml is an software architect and systems designer with over thirty years of experience. For two decades, r0ml worked on Wall Street, developing market data, trading, risk management, and quantitative analysis systems. More recently, as chief technical architect at AT&T Wireless, he drove the improvement of their CRM, ERP, commission, and data warehousing systems. Over the last several years, r0ml has become increasingly interested in open source software strategy at large enterprises, and is a frequent speaker on the topic.

This is the same R0ml that thaumaturgy mentions in a sibling comment.

I've been lucky to meet a lot of very smart programmers over the past 3.5 years working at Hacker School, and R0ml is one of the people I respect the most. He has a lot of opinions about programming, many of them contrarian. I think this comes from his background. His career began in the '70s. He spent the first third of it working in APL, the next third in Smalltalk, and the most recent third in Java. Over the year or so that I've known R0ml, he's planted the seeds of a number of unconventional ideas in my head (program in the database, don't use libraries, write things from scratch, the expressive power of a language is partially derived from what's in its standard library). I'm sure these aren't all good ideas—maybe some of them are terrible—but they've profoundly affected the way I go about my programming. R0ml is on the short list of people I would want to work for if I was not running Hacker School.

I don't bring this all up to refute your opinions–R0ml may be wrong in this case or even in all cases–I mostly wanted to give some context explaining why the tone of your response made me sad and frustrated. The onus is on us to give readers context for what they're reading, and I don't think we did a great job of that, but if you're going to write such a mean spirited response, I think some of the onus is on you to do some research before accusing someone of being a novice and responding in a way that feels at least partially ad hominem.

Around a month ago, I read Programming with Managed Time[^2], the paper that you wrote with Jonathan Edwards for Onward! '14. I thought it was insightful, well written, and contrarian in the best of ways. The first things I thought when I finished it was "I bet R0ml would enjoy that."

I don't mean to compare Code Words to an academic journal (it's absolutely not), nor do I mean to compare R0ml's article to your paper in terms of scope, research, or time put into it (yours obviously took more time and has much greater insight than R0ml's short article). I'm just bummed that one person who's counterintuitive opinions and experience I respect would be so quick to dismiss the opinions of someone else who I respect for the same reasons.

I know that complaining about tone is often used to distract from more substantive issues, but I'm going to risk doing that anyway: Please be nice!

Thanks.

[^1]: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2006/view/e_spkr/1551

[^2]: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/211297/onward14.pdf

Replies davidbalbert · 2014-12-06
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