General Observations About Technical Debates

Below are a few general observations independent of any specific technical debate:

a) Developers love to passionately debate and compare languages, frameworks, APIs, and tools. This is true in every programming community (.NET, Java, PHP, C++, Ruby, Python, etc). I think you can view these types of religious technical debates in two ways:

1. They are sometimes annoying and often a waste of time.
2. They are often a sign of a healthy and active community (since passion means people care deeply on both sides of a debate, and is far better than apathy).

Personally I think both points are true.

b) There is never only “one right way” to develop something. As an opening interview question I sometimes ask people to sort an array of numbers in the most efficient way they can. Most people don’t do well with it. This is usually not because they don’t know sort algorithms, but rather because they never think to ask the scenarios and requirements behind it – which is critical to understanding the most efficient way to do it. How big is the sequence of numbers? How random is the typical number sequence (is it sometimes already mostly sorted, how big is the spread of numbers, are the numbers all unique, do duplicates cluster together)? How parallel is the computer architecture? Can you allocate memory as part of the sort or must it be constant? Etc. These are important questions to ask because the most efficient and optimal way to sort an array of numbers depends on understanding the answers.

Whenever people assert that there is only “one right way” to a programming problem they are almost always assuming a fixed set of requirements/scenarios/inputs – which is rarely optimal for every scenario or every developer. And to state the obvious - most problems in programming are far more complex than sorting an array of numbers.

c) Great developers using bad tools/frameworks can make great apps. Bad developers using great tools/frameworks can make bad apps. Be very careful about making broad assumptions (good or bad) about the quality of the app you are building based on the tools/frameworks used.

d) Developers (good and bad) can grow stronger by stretching themselves and learning new ideas and approaches. Even if they ultimately don’t use something new directly, the act of learning it can sharpen them in positive ways.

e) Change is constant in the technology industry. Change can be scary. Whether you get overwhelmed by change, though, ultimately comes down to whether you let yourself be overwhelmed. Don’t stress about having to stop and suddenly learn a bunch of new things - rarely do you have to. The best approach to avoid being overwhelmed is to be pragmatic, stay reasonably informed about a broad set of things at a high-level (not just technologies and tools but also methodologies), and have the confidence to know that if it is important to learn a new technology, then your existing development skills will mostly transition and help. Syntax and APIs are rarely the most important thing anyway when it comes to development – problem solving, customer empathy/engagement, and the ability to stay focused and disciplined on a project are much more valuable.

f) Some guidance I occasionally give people on my team when working and communicating with others:

1. You will rarely win a debate with someone by telling them that they are stupid - no matter how well intentioned or eloquent your explanation of their IQ problems might be.
2. There will always be someone somewhere in the world who is smarter than you - don’t always assume that they aren’t in the room with you.
3. People you interact with too often forget the praise you give them, and too often remember a past insult - so be judicious in handing them out as they come back to haunt you later.
4. People can and do change their minds - be open to being persuaded in a debate, and neither gloat nor hold it against someone else if they also change their minds.

g) I always find it somewhat ironic when I hear people complain about programming abstractions not being good. Especially when these complaints are published via blogs – whose content is displayed using HTML, is styled with CSS, made interactive with JavaScript, transported over the wire using HTTP, and implemented on the server with apps written in higher-level languages, using object oriented garbage collected frameworks, running on top of either interpreted or JIT-compiled byte code runtimes, and which ultimately store the blog content and comments in relational databases ultimately accessed via SQL query strings. All of this running within a VM on a hosted server – with the OS within the VM partitioning memory across kernel and user mode process boundaries, scheduling work using threads, raising device events using signals, and using an abstract storage API fo disk persistence. It is worth keeping all of that in mind the next time you are reading a “ORM vs Stored Procedures” or “server controls – good/bad?” post. The more interesting debates are about what the best abstractions are for a particular problem.

h) The history of programming debates is one long infinite loop – with most programming ideas having been solved multiple times before. And for what it’s worth – many of the problems we debate today were long ago solved with LISP and Smalltalk. Ironically, despite pioneering a number of things quite elegantly, these two languages tend not be used much anymore. Go figure.