Good or bad

Telling the difference is hard.

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Being a programmer is mostly

Drinking coffee
Googling answers on stackoverflow
Making choices

Which framework to use
Which libraries to use
How code should be written

Which frameworks are good, and which are bad.
Which libraries are good, and which are bad.
What code would be good, and what would be bad.

What is good?

What is bad?

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

Rob Malda (founder of slashdot), on the iPod at its release in 2001.

400 million iPods sold

There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 30 April 2007

1.2 billion iPhones sold
$750 billion revenue

Why this talk

Some still saw the iPhone as shit:

can't even replace the battery
can't even put a memory card in it
can't even send MMS at launch.

Some thought the iPhone was only selling well for the wrong reasons:

First smart phone to the market.
Apple products sell well just because they look good.
Apple spends more on marketing than other companies.
Iphone owners are sheep who buy it just because it's popular

If you think something is bad, but it's hugely popular, you're failing to tell good from bad.

Emotions

Math is hard

Emotions

http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/

Programmers like to think of themselves as coldly logical and rational beings But we get bored of using current technology and want to start using new stuff. Fun story - the last place I worked we were evaluating what technology we should be using for the project. One of the senior programmers suggested we should use Neo4J as it's FAST. Me: Do we really need fast? Them: We could serve 10s of thousands of requests a second if we used it! We then did some work to figure out how many requests we needed to server per second. It turns out that the highest the load would be is less than 1 request per second. Choosing the most boring technology that fits your need is almost always going to be the right choice.

Which of these is better

Code that is easy to understand, has a good design, and has a good number unit tested.

Code that is rough around the edges, is full of hacks and isn't fully tested.

Aesthetics

Kintsugi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

Wabi-sabi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

Wabi-sabi

Derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence

impermanence
suffering
emptiness / absence of self-nature

Math is hard

https://twitter.com/farbodsaraf/status/923353731948863489

We overvalue features.
We undervalue ease of use.

Some languages are crap

English is an objectively crap language.

English can be understood through tough thorough thought though.

Did you read it?
Yes, I read it.

English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

PHP keeps old bugs around

English keeps old spellings around like
"won't"
"cholmondeley"
"Featherstonhaugh"

English lacks features.

Most European languages have a polite and informal way of saying 'you'.

Other languages have deferential ways of talking

Less, "Yo! Get me a some water?"; and more, "It's a warm day for a nice refreshment, no?"

Java has a feature that PHP lacks: threads

Ruby has a feature that PHP lacks: Monkey-patching

One of the most powerful aspects of Ruby is the ability to re-open any class and change it’s methods. Yes that’s right, you can actually reopen any class and change how it works. This includes the standard Ruby classes like String, Array or Hash!

Neither PHP or English are widely used.

80% of the web powered by PHP

1.5 billion people speak English, and it's the language used for business worldwide.

If you think something is bad, but it's hugely popular, you're failing to tell good from bad.

Lack of consistency

Easier to adopt new ideas.
Easier to grow and adapt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators https://www.goethe.de/en/spr/mag/20802137.html

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-og-bastile-vous-tu-20140711-htmlstory.html

https://twitter.com/MrDanack

Formal / polite

English - hard to give offense accidentally.

With all due respect....
Thanks a bunch!
See you next Tuesday

NEVER SAY THESE PHRASES

PHP lacks threads

This means it's not possible to write programs that deadlock internally.

PHP lacks monkey-patching


r = 4/3  # => 1
r.class  # => Fixnum

require 'mathn'

r = 4/3  # => (4/3)
r.class  # => Rational

Features generally make things harder to use

Things that affect everyday use accumulate, but that involve big numbers

Why was the iPod so successful?

Itunes - shit but good enough
The wheel interface

Nokia made a huge mistake

Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone
This is not an emerging business. In fact it’s gone so far that it’s in the process of consolidation with probably two players dominating everything, Nokia and Motorola.

These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.

There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive.

- John Dvorak

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-should-pull-the-plug-on-the-iphone

iPhone models in 10 years

iPhone iPhone 3G iPhone 3GS iPhone 4 iPhone 4S iPhone 5 iPhone 5c iPhone 5s iPhone 6 iPhone 6 Plus iPhone 6s iPhone 6s Plus iPhone SE iPhone 7 iPhone 7 Plus iPhone 8 iPhone 8 Plus iPhone X

Nokia models in just 2007

Nokia N800 Nokia N93i Nokia 6110 Navigator Nokia 6131 NFC Nokia N76 Nokia 3110 classic Nokia E61i Nokia E65 Nokia E90 Nokia N77 Nokia 5070 Nokia 5700 XpressMusic Nokia 7088 Nokia 8800 Sirocco Gold Nokia 6120 classic Nokia 1200 Nokia 1208 Nokia 1208b Nokia 1650 Nokia 2505 Nokia 2630 Nokia 2660 Nokia 2760 Nokia 2760h Nokia 3109 classic Nokia 6500 classic Nokia 6500 slide Nokia 8600 Luna Nokia 3500 classic Nokia 6121 classic Nokia 6267 Nokia 5611 XpressMusic Nokia 6131i Nokia 7500 Prisma Nokia 7900 Prism Nokia 6555 Nokia 500 Auto Navigation Nokia 5310 XpressMusic Nokia 5610 XpressMusic Nokia N81 Nokia N81 8GB Nokia N95 8GB Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition Nokia E51 Nokia 6301 Nokia 2135 Nokia N810 Nokia 6066 Nokia NM705i Nokia 8800 Arte Nokia 8800 Sapphire Arte Nokia N82 Nokia 3110 Evolve Nokia 6263

53!!ONE!!! different models.

List from http://nokiamuseum.info/category/launching-year/2007/

Why was the iPhone so successful?

Left features out - no copy paste, no MMS
Really simplified the interface. 3 buttons vs 9 buttons + 5 way nipple on my old SE K800i
Spent a huge amount of engineering on making the scrolling smooth

Getting better at telling good from bad

Recognise your own emotions.
Push back against features.
Put effort into making life easy
Be prepared to still be wrong

Be prepared to be wrong.

Decouple your code
Write tests
Spend less time thinking deciding between good or bad

Be prepared to be wrong. Particular around choosing libraries and frameworks....there is an incredibly high chance that whatever you choose is just not going to be the right choice....so write your code so that as much of it as possible is decoupled from _any_ library. (that includes your own libraries). Brucie bonus - this is very likely to make your code easier to test as well. a good way to measure this is to keep asking - if we removed this library how much of the other code would we need to alter - aka I fucking hate active record/eloquent. If you're not good at something, spend less time doing it. Spend less time making decisions. Which of the following scenarios is likely to have the best result for the i) A committee of 5 people spend a week choosing which library to use. ii) A single person spends 5 weeks choosing which library to use. iii) A single person spend 5 minutes choosing which library to use, and then spending the next 5 weeks trying it out......then finding out what it wrong with it, and realising that what you need from that library is quite different from what you thought was important.

https://twitter.com/mrmrs_/status/919984596166508544

Fin

https://joind.in/talk/00de7

Why is KFC popular around the world.

Good or bad? - telling the difference is hard.

A large part of being a programmer is making choices, whether it's what framework to use, what libraries to use or just how to structure code. Every day when we're programming we try to take choices that are good, and avoid choices that are bad.

But what if actually we're all terrible at telling the difference between good and bad? What if we're all just not very good at a fundamental skill needed to do our jobs?

In this talk I'm going to try to demonstrate a couple of common epistemological mistakes that people make, how you can try to analyze what is good and what is bad a bit better, and how to limit the consequences that come inevitably when bad choices are made.