oh no, I just updated a ruby gem!

Are you a ruby developer? Do you want to manufacturer something to do? Well here is a quick tip. Take your beautiful working Rails 3 application that you started creating 6 months ago and type in “bundle update”.

I don’t think there exists a time when I have issued that command and then 10 seconds after it completed not thought “what the fuck was I thinking”. Just about every gem that updates seems to make several breaking changes. For real comedy value it’s worth doing it between major Rails releases, actually, I take that back, make that minor Rails releases.

This just doesn’t seem to happen with C++ libraries. When coding in C++ (which I do almost every day) I can reliably update to even major version changes and still be pretty much guaranteed that what worked before will still be working now. At most you get a “deprecation” warning. Not in the Ruby world, oh no, here progress is rapid but backwards compatibility is an afterthought. It really is no wonder that enterprises are so cagey about moving to, how can we say it, well in the words of Steve Yegge, hardcore liberal languages. There is something to be said for stability.

So is this a bad thing? As much as I would like to say that I think it is, I’m just not that sure. There is nothing more frustrating than using something that is not willing to change (I’m looking squarely at you Java). It’s the fact that there is no attempt to maintain backwards compatibility for at least a short period of time that doesn’t fill me with confidence.

These days you see many people picking the latest and greatest technology to build a business on. This always makes me squirm just a little. This may be OK for a small business with technical founders. However, it makes little sense for a company with shareholders where employees can leave at any time. I certainly wouldn’t want a company I’d invested my money in being in left open to the vagaries of change quite so much.

stop trying to show how smart you are

Sitting feeling bright and somewhat giddy with my own self confidence I decided to dust down my copy of “C++ Template Metaprogramming” by David Abrahams and Aleksey Gurtovoy. Thinking I really need to be the master of something and further thinking C++ template programming was that “thing”. I approached the task with some gusto for at least a few ~~days~~ ~~hours~~ minutes, however, as with most advanced study you really have to be willing to dedicate your life to it. It’s never long before the inevitable gloom of reality sets in and you realise that this is more than an afternoons work. Without much control your brain starts telling you that there are much more important things you could be doing. Thankfully for everyone else on your team you stop and decide that it’s just not worth it.

The fact is that writing code that only those who have decided to dedicate a fair chunk of their life to is never going to be the right choice. There is nothing worse than trying to understand code like this. There are times where it pays to be smart, like when you have a better (much) faster algorithm, or doing something saves you hundreds of lines of code. But most of the time you see this kind of code it’s people just trying to prove how smart they are.

Now C++ is not alone in this. Ruby has exactly the same problem – you can get stuff happening as if by magic. I could be wrong but I imagine most people read code from top to bottom, working line by line, they don’t expect code to be auto generated or happen as some elaborate method_missing technique. Sure I can maybe relax my vitriol for those building frameworks where things are being used in some generic unknown context. However the vast majority of applications out there don’t have to deal with these problems. The biggest problem these applications face is that the developers creating them want to architect some elaborate framework to fit a very specific use case – it almost makes me cry. I’m not sure why as a profession we don’t revel in an approach that oozes simplicity. This is certainly what the smartest developers I’ve working with have always managed to do.

questioning the truth

So, a colleague once told me of a story where an important academic paper (well important in its respected field) presented results that turned out to be false. Not exactly NEWS (think more first-world-problem) but this paper was peer reviewed and appeared in a prominent journal but still managed to slip through. This paper turned out to be cited in many places and only when my colleague tried to reproduce the results many years later did it become apparent things were not right – it turned out to be a bug in the original authors code that caused skewed results in his empirical analysis.

The thing is though, this kind of shit happens all the time, and it’s really fucking annoying. If you attended any conferences, meetups, usergroups, etc this practice is rife. Someone standing in front of an audience says something and it’s almost always instantly taken as fact, without the need to provide sources of proof. The audience then believe this to be true, as in many causes they are in no position to prove otherwise, and those that do voice an opinion are seen as being “aggressive”. The sad fact is that most of the time errors/hearsay go uncorrected, and people walk away misinformed.

The fact of the matter is that you really need assume what someone has said might not be true, do your own follow up and make decisions based on what the evidence supports. Remember that many people have agendas, and also that it’s very possible that speakers are talking about something that they have only a rudimentary understand of. Don’t blindly assume that what someone purports to be be true is actually the truth.