Why is the internet so extreme? or No, your language is not dead.

Ok, so. The internets. It’s all about extremes, something is THE BEST! or something is THE WORST! You know? Apparently everyone on the nets either loves something or hates it, there’s very little middle ground – part of this is the fact that, well, if you’re middling on something, you’re much less likely to write about it. But there’s also some kind of psychological voodoo that simply makes people exaggerate their actual beliefs. Hey, I’ve been known to rarely engage in hyperbole on this very blog. Gasp! I know right?

Don’t worry, your language is going to be fine

You see this all over the place, most recently, I came across this IBM piece refuting the notion that Java was dead. Wait. Wait. What? Someone’s gone to all the trouble to try and prove that Java wasn’t dead? WTF? Who in their right mind believes that that could possibly be true? Sure it isn’t the poster child of development that it once had, but so what?

The problem is that for the internet, if something isn’t basking in the warm, loving glow of the hype machine, it may as well be dead. Right now the hype machine’s unblinking eye is focused on Ruby and maybe a little Python. If you look at the numbers of developers and sites running them, it just doesn’t support the notion. How, then, could this happen? How could so many smart people think this? One factor is the fact that programmers love their languages and they love to talk smack about other ones.

The Echo Chamber Effect

But there is a selection bias inherent in the web, the echo chamber effect. You read what you already tend to agree with and it amplifies your opinions. Therefor, it’s important to read a wide range of opinions, especially well thought out ones that you don’t agree with. In general this means reading kind of a lot. Fortunately there’s tools to help you with that. Google Reader is indispensable for me – I can go through a veritable crap load of information very, very quickly with it. FriendFeed is another excellent tool for finding interesting information but even more importantly engaging in the conversation around it. A delicious marketplace of ideas.

But those are just tools to help you – neither good nor evil – they can also be the primary culprits in the echo chamber, as I’m beginning to understand. They allow you to process a lot more information, but if all that is feeds and opinions from the Echo Chamberlains (hat tip to Noah Carter!) then it makes the matter worse. I’ve just started to become conscious in seeking out voices outside my normal confines but this is a particularly difficult thing to do. It seems that most tools are, reasonably, designed to show you information you’d like based on information you already like – exactly what I’m trying to avoid. It’s a slow process to be sure, but, I think it is a valuable one.

Break on through to the other side

I’m starting to click on links I otherwise might have not even noticed. Investigating the small “discussion” links in Techmeme with names that I haven’t seen yet. Using FriendFeed to find people to subscribe to who aren’t in turn subscribed to all the A-listers. Part of me, though, has a fear that these sites are self-defeating for the purpose, given the selection (or self-selection) process involved. I’m just not sure about anything at this point. I don’t just want to find people that have a different viewpoint than me, I want to find the people that are talking about things I haven’t even thought about.

Maybe this is all the signal to noise business that everyone’s talking about (that’s an excellent piece, read it!), but I think there’s something else in there. I haven’t quite put my finger on it, but I don’t think the fundamental solution is getting the biggest firehose and distilling it down to manageable nuggets. It’s a slog initially, but I have hope that once I form a foundation of alternate voices, it will become easier to find more. It’s not that I want to completely leave the the echo chamber, no, I quite like my little echo chamber – I just want to find your chamber, too. What do you think? Too much ado about nothing? Or have you had success in finding other perspectives?

felix

Yeah, Ruby definitely has the momentum now, although it seems to be quieting down. Python's always had a little momentum, with a big backer like Google it's hard not to. But definitely, it just isn't hard to increase a tiny userbase - although, Apple like, it does seem to be a very high quality small userbase. Huh, Ruby/Python : Apple - PHP : Dell? Heh.

I like to think, though, that it was PHP that provided the general acceptance of dynamic languages. Unfettered by Perl's unfortunate tie (in people's minds) with the slowness of CGI scripting everyone started using it. I think what Ruby and Python are doing are giving it more of an academic flavor so that even snobby folk can finally be ok with it. :)

I agree with you re: Perl 6. In many ways, though, I'm more excited for Parrot. Seeing the performance improvement that SquirrelFish brought to javascript by moving to (amongst other things) a register based VM makes me think that the world would not be bad off with a general register based vm for all dynamic languages. An Apache mod_parrot could be a powerful thing.
mpodrazik

Perl is totally dead, so is JavaScript:
http://blog.symbiont.net/2008/...

Seriously though, I agree with you about the hype factor surrounding languages like Ruby. I think though that another contributing factor beyond general extremeness is growth rate. If you look at the job trends at indeed.com for an arbitrary selection of languages, (http://www.indeed.com/jobtrend..., it shows perl beating out other dynamic languages like php, python and ruby, (although still behind c, java, c++ and c#).

If you check the relative scale though, (http://www.indeed.com/jobtrend..., ruby is just off the chart. Yeah, you can say that because it's mindshare/marketshare is so small that it's easy for it to rack up big growth rates, and you'd be right, but big moves like that that are new are the definition of news, and that in turn feeds the blogs and the general zeitgeist.

The ruby hyperbole I think is on its way out. What is good though, I think, is a general acceptance of dynamic languages, and maybe more than that but a breaking down of peoples' inhibitions about language proliferation in general. That can only be good for something like perl once 6 is official, right?

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