David Heinemeier Hansson step aside, Paul Graham is next to be voted off the island

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/01/david-heinemeier-hansson-step-aside.html

by raganwald • 18 years ago

53 28 18 years ago

weblog.raganwald.com

asdflkj• 18 years ago

>promotes the language extensively

>relentless self-promotion

When and how did that happen?

bdr• 18 years ago

Seriously, what self-promotion?

pg2• 18 years ago

I was thinking that too. I can't think of any cases recently where I've engaged in relentless self-promotion.

I mean, I write essays, and since I believe the things I say in them, I am in a technical sense writing things that promote my own ideas, and thus me. But that's true of anyone who writes.

He can't have meant anything so complicated. Here's my theory of what he meant, based on his use of Matz as an example: relentlessly skipping the self-effacing remarks that most people surround their ideas with to help make the medicine go down.

If that's what he means, he's right. I don't do it out of arrogance, though. I skip that kind of stuff partly because it seems too much like a deliberate trick, and partly because it makes sentences longer than they need to be.

icky2• 18 years ago

> Seriously, what self-promotion?

Well, he did write about it on paulgraham.com, the #1 site for anything, ever.

bfioca3• 18 years ago

Wait, I'm confused. What's the point of this post? A meta-discussion about fallout from unmet expectations compared to koolaid-drinking trends? Don't you people have stuff to do?

raganwald3• 18 years ago

What has more impact on the adoption of technologies: its technical merits or social behaviour?

bfioca3• 18 years ago

I'd like to think it's a good combination of both. New technology with technical merit arrives, smart people latch on and build things with it, improving the knowledge base and library depth. Then, more people flock on as they follow the leaders.

michaelneale• 18 years ago

Totally social behavior (out of those 2). History shows technical merits ALWAYS lose out. Its almost a law, I have no idea why.

pchristensen• 18 years ago

I think technical people believe in the free market too much without understanding all of the requirements. One of them is that everyone has perfect knowledge of all options. If someone doesn't know about you, they can't choose you. This is why marketing adds so much value - you become an option and your technical merits have a chance to shine. If you market something crappy, you'll only succeed if no one knows about the better alternative.

mixmax2• 18 years ago

The point of the post is to point out some basic psychology and human nature. And I think it is quite accurate too.

Note that PG and DHH could just as easily have been anyone else, the article just uses them as examples to prove a point.

And frankly I think that a lot of readers of YC news could do good with some insight into psychology and what makes people tick. It is a large part of a startups success.

(note: I don't intend to offend anyone, it is simply humble advice which you may of course ignore at your own discretion)

bfioca3• 18 years ago

I guess I can see that. I'm just put off a bit by the way it's worded. I suppose that's the point, though.

curi• 18 years ago

Who are you talking about when you say "we"? I like Steve Jobs. As well as Woz.

boucher• 18 years ago

I think Steve and Apple is a horrible comparison here.

gruseom• 18 years ago

we are angry with Paul for daring to elbow us aside on his climb up the ladder

Elbowing? Ladder-climbing? Good grief. This is the sort of crap that makes me happy not to be any kind of celebrity.

The only statement here that seems accurate to me is that many people are motivated by envy. Even "Schadenfreude" is the wrong term to use; releasing Arc is hardly any kind of misfortune. And I don't see what Paul Graham and David Hansson have in common, other than that they get mentioned in contentless techfan wordfluff.

olefoo• 18 years ago

> contentless techfan wordfluff

A very competitive segment of the marketplace of hot air.

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

I think many people mistakenly thought Arc was supposed to be some new kind of framework like Ruby on Rails. I'll bet few of them read the stuff over at http://paulgraham.com/arc.html ahead of time.

I wonder how many people just jumped to the download announcement compared to the number who read the Arc essays.

icky2• 18 years ago

> I think many people mistakenly thought Arc was supposed to be some new kind of framework like Ruby on Rails.

- Didn't you hear? Arc, the language, uses tables in its HTML!

(My god, I would never use a programming language that was ever used to generate tables!)

- The zeroth release of Arc only supports ASCII! What about us EBCDIC users?!

- Arc didn't cure my unsightly dandruff, like I hoped and prayed it would!

- Arc is out and Jesus didn't come back!

- I downloaded Arc and the tarball just sat there in the directory, doing nothing!

- Arc doesn't completely integrate itself with its temporary host language!

- Arc killed my entire village, just as we were about to start our annual Unicode Festival!

- Arc is just a bunch of library functions and syntactic transformations on a parse tree that ultimately compiles to machine code. There is NOTHING new here!

(Did I miss any? ;-)

Xichekolas• 18 years ago

I don't know what you're talking about. I downloaded Arc and it immediately became sentient on my machine. It started writing it's own macros and evolving while I slept, and I'm pretty sure we all woke up this morning inside the Matrix.

sammyo• 18 years ago

> (Did I miss any? ;-)

Yep, the Duke Nukem Forever rewrite is waiting for Arc.

DanielBMarkham• 18 years ago

huh?

I don't have a dog in the fight. I wasn't looking forward to Arc, and I am not going to try it.

But it seems kind of weird to say that people who were disappointed had dubious psychological motives. What if, perhaps, they expected the first released to be stand-alone and that's not what happened? I mean, aren't there lots of ways to be disappointed that don't involve some kind of psychoanalysis and therapy?

I'm sure people are petty and small mammals. But I don't watch Dr. Phill for a reason -- you can make various psycho arguments all day and not really have a lot of anything when you are done. Perhaps the author of _this_ piece is really just a suck-up? There's simply no basis for evaluating one opinion over another. I guess I could say the article is crap, but that would take less words. :)

eVizitei• 18 years ago

Personally, I'm suprised this train has generated as much steam as it has. The emotional intensity of the commentary wars between the "Arc Sucks" camp and the "You suck for thinking that Arc Sucks" camp is perhaps higher than the situation warrents. Those who like it will use it even in the absence of some important features, those who don't certainly don't have to (I daresay there are plenty of other programming languages for them to use). :-)

David Heinemeier Hansson step aside, Paul Graham is next to be voted off the island

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