/dev/Kico

Oracle/Sun explained in two pictures

www.sun.com

www.oracle.com

Brasil quer macs!

Olá a todos. Se você é brasileiro e, como eu, também gosta dos produtos da Apple (especificamente os computadores), deve de também estar ultrajado com os novos preços adotados aqui no Brasil. Convenhamos: R$ 6700,00 pelo modelo básico do iMac é no mínimo um insulto. Será que a Apple pensa que nós brasileiros somos milionários?

Pensando nisto, acabo de lançar o movimento “Brasil quer macs!”. O objetivo consiste em coletar argumentos em prol de uma redução justa dos preços dos produtos Apple no mercado nacional. Se você quer consumir os produtos da Apple e também não consegue aceitar os preços atualmente impostos, junte-se a mim nesta empreitada!

Basta acessar o endereço http://www.itexto.net/brasilquermacs e nos fornecer sua presença e argumentos para convencer a empresa a reduzir seus preços aqui em território nacional.

Another trap for developers: linguistic determinism

Ludwig Wittgenstein

RAD environments can suppress the symptoms of impotence through the illusion of power

The immortal argument “my programming language is better than yours”, which is actually a reminiscence of childhood “my toy is better than yours” always caught my attention. I can spend hours amusing myself with these talks. That’s when I ask myself: can a programming language mutilate your mind? Can a single programming language produce a stupid? I think it can. A lot!

At the philosophy course, I was really impressed by the concept of linguistic determinism, which is the idea that the language shapes thought. Some philosophers go beyond that: Wittgenstein for example used to say (and I fully agree) that the limits of the world are actually the limits of the language. It’s a valid point of view: you only know something when you actually can describe it.

And where does our language comes from? Well, it’s actually the result of our environment (or is it something intrinsic?). The environment shapes our language. Here is a banal example: someone which lives in the arctic can identify several kinds of white, which will be reflected in it’s own vocabulary. I can only perceive one kind of white (I’m from Brazil), because white is not a common color in our environment. But I can perceive several types of bananas that a foreigner can’t perceive at first sight.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

This reminds me a Dijkstra quote: “the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.“. In this case, this quote comes from the lecture “The threats to Computer Science”, which subject was the way how computer science courses were being taught at the time. Curiously, some people use to say the same about Java.

So the question is: can a programming language “mutilate the mind beyond recovery”? In my opinion, yes it can. Actually, I saw many cases of developers which can create amazing things in Delphi or Visual Basic (6) but every time they try to learn a new programming language fails miserably. They actually try to learn some other languages, but they usually think that it’s more safe to keep with what they already know then to try something new.

Something very similar I can see in Java too. Given the success of this language in several environments, many times the developer get used to it and never more ought to learn any other thing. The justification is always the same: “if I already know Java so well, why would I learn other languages or environment?”. In the case of Visual Basic (I’m always referring here to Visual Basic 6), this deficit is clearer: after wall, it’s considered by Microsoft as a deprecated language. In this sense, those who use to develop using VB6 have a huge advantage compared to those which are used to Java. The levels of arrogance are considerably lower, so the need to learn something new soars in this case. The problem is that in both cases they are only taking into consideration the fear to became technologically obsolete. The real problem is not obsolesce: it’s the linguistic determinism.

Which makes me think of the real role of the developer: reproduce computationally the solution of a given problem. Well, given that the perception of our world may be influenced by our language, and programming languages are actually shaping our view of the development process, our perception of it will be reduced if we only know one (or two) programming language.

Ignoring other programming languages imply in ignoring the main cause why programming languages are created: solve problems that can’t be easily solved by the languages present at the time of it’s inception. Are those general purpose languages? Yes, absolutely. So, shouldn’t these languages provide a wide view of the development process? Sure, but the world changes all the time. New problems arise while others are overpassed. If not, so we would have only a few programming languages today. This is why the argument “all the languages are basically the same, the only difference is the syntax” is so stupid.

Personally, I don’t know if it’s a good thing to know only languages based on managed code like Java or C#. That’s because they don’t show to the developer the inner workings of how a computer works. I don’t think also that you may be an expert in assembler too. But at least the basics of it you should know. Maybe at least C.

By the way, the formula “knowing only one x is not a good thing” where x equals programming language, programming paradigm, development environment or operating system is always true, because, as I mentioned earlier, you are actually limiting your perception of the world. As many things you know, as many dots you have to connect. And as many dots you have to connect, better will be your solutions.

And this is why I don’t like RAD environments at all. I think they are great for our productivity, but if someone starts it’s professional life through one of these tools, it will be really hard to get out of it when needed. As I mentioned I saw many cases of VB6 developers which had really bad times trying to learn other languages like Java or C#. In this case, not because VB6 or Delphi sucks, but because those environments usually create the illusion that software development is easy.

PS:
By the way, if you only know one language/environment, it’ll always be hard to learn anything which is different from it. (so it’s not a Delphi or VB6 exclusivity)

Developer types: Mr. Sucker

This week for the first time I blocked someone on msn. Actually, I blocked this person because he were what I use to call the “developer sucker”. Here is how our conversations get started.

It’s usual for me to help other developers (and be helped) by IM. Actually, I just love to help and get in touch with other developers, because it’s a really rich experience (at least for me). So here is how this sad experience get started.

I use to screencast some developer courses for DevMedia, so this person (let us call him Mr. Sucker) appeared on my Msn with the following question:

Mr Sucker: Could you please send me all your videos that you post at DevMedia?

So, after I explained him that these courses were actually DevMedia’s property, here is what I heard:

Mr. Sucker: But you made those videos. So they’re yours! And they are too expensive too: US$ 0.75 each!

Well, here I started to get pissed. So I just thought that the best thing to do was to just ignore this part. Well, some days later, Mr Sucker appeared again with this message:

Mr. Sucker: How can I install Grails on Linux?

Not even a “good day”, “how are you?”, nothing. Just a question. So I explained to him, and in this week, this guy just asked me several times the same question. And I always sent to him the same links over and over again.

So, suddenly he just changed his question and told me that he was going to talk about Grails on Fisl 10, which was a shock for me. After all, how could he do that if he doesn’t even know how to install it??? So I asked him how could he do that without knowing anything about the subject. Here is his answer:

Mr. Sucker: I believe that in one week I can do that.

My answer, of course was: you WHAT???

Well, again I just ignored him (after all, since I don’t know him in person, maybe he could be a genius or something like that), and few hours later, another question appeared:

Mr. Sucker: Kico, could you please explain to me how Git works in detail? I want to use GitHub.

As a answer, I sent to him the GitHub guide link(which is excelent). And here is what I heard:

Mr Sucker: Explain to me how Git works in detail! I want to use GitHub.

I always sent the same answer. Actually, this cycle only stopped when I asked him why he was asking me the same question over and over again. Here is his answer:

Mr Sucker: I don’t wanna read. I don’t know english very well.

So I sent to him some links in portuguese, and to my shock, here is what he said:

Mr Sucker: Actually, I don’t like to read. I like to watch videos or by msn only. Please, could you help me or not?

And my answer was: you’re blocked. What really amazed me was the fact that Mr Sucker actually personified several of the traps I mentioned some posts ago in a single week. This kind of situation horrified me when I thought about the fact that there are thousands of these “programmers” around the world, actually employed and producing “something”. I mean: how someone so illiterate can get a job?

PS:
Mr Sucker is not going to read this post. It’s not a video and it’s not in portuguese.