The Parley Letter

http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/the-parley-letter.html

by thisduck • 14 years ago

132 49 14 years ago

david.heinemeierhansson.com

rb2k_• 14 years ago

He keeps writing "Parsley" instead of "Parely". For other non-native english speakers (like me), here's the defintion:

Parley:

Parley (/ˈpɑrli/) is a discussion or conference, especially one between enemies over terms of a truce or other matters. For example, in Julius Caesar (a tragedy by William Shakespeare), the respective followers and armies of Brutus and Antony are ready for a truce. The root of the word parley is parler, which is the French verb "to speak"

Parsely:

Garden parsley is a bright green, hairless, biennial, herbaceous plant in temperate climates, or an annual herb in subtropical and tropical areas.

jeremymcanally• 14 years ago

My guess is that iOS autocorrect strikes again. :)

unimpressive2• 14 years ago

Autocorrect is a bad idea. The kind of spelling error that iOS corrects (At least as far as I know.) is a syntactic error. Whereas the kind of error that autocorrect introduces is a semantic error. A semantic error is much worse than a syntactic one. At worst, a syntactic error leaves your meaning ambiguous. At worst, a semantic error leaves your meaning incorrect or inverted.

Usually you can read past a syntactic error, but a semantic error could change the tone or meaning of your entire message.

Rygu• 14 years ago

Some related posts that probably spawned this article. You can find DHH's response in the comments: http://gammons.github.com/architecture/2012/12/22/where-the-...

This talk (31 min, grab some coffee) also gives a better context. http://confreaks.com/videos/1125-gogaruco2012-mega-rails

bdcravens• 14 years ago

My understanding is that this article was in response to various questions that were asked of him on the Ruby Rogues Parley list (all guests are on the list, and others can pay to be on the list). Of course, recent topics he covered like hypermedia were colored by those recent discussions.

xentronium2• 14 years ago

I guess we need a new entry in http://rubydramas.com

pbiggar2• 14 years ago

You know, this strikes me as very sane and cogent essay into maintainability and rails. Where does the drama come form?

jrabone2• 14 years ago

It's inherent in everything the Ruby community does - sooner or later someone will come along and write a 14 page diatribe about how DHH is full of shit and then flounce out in a cloud of opprobrium.

xentronium2• 14 years ago

To DHH credit, he always has fair points in his opinions, but the way he expresses these points is never diplomatic. For example, he couldn't resist making some blanket statements about java world and rspec.

I am not sure about how intentional that is, but it surely is dramatical in 'flame war eliciting' sense of word.

regularfry2• 14 years ago

If anything, this is deflation of previous drama.

typicalrunt2• 14 years ago

I think some clarity is in order.

While Java certainly isn't a pinnacle of language design, it took quite a few years of devolution to go from something relatively simple like servlets to the steaming pile of shit that is J2EE

I believe he means to say EJB here, and not J2EE, because Servlets are a part of J2EE.

jrabone2• 14 years ago

Yeah, and I don't think he's been keeping up with Java EE 6 - EJBs are dead, long live JPA annotations. Of course, Spring is likely on borrowed time too. Just maybe we can lose the whole concept of a "framework", lightweight or not, that has kept those architects in business for so long.

cunac2• 14 years ago

why antagonism to architects ? It is only developer which actually will think about implications of what is doing from more than one point. It would be nice if I see more developers doing that instead just coding big pile of ..(you got a picture I guess)

dhh3• 14 years ago

J2EE's sins include far more than just EJB. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Platform,_Enterprise_Editi.... Servlets got just started running with a bad crowd, even though deep down it was a good kid.

mhw2• 14 years ago

Personally I wouldn't let servlets off that easily. One of the basic design choices they made was one request handling function per class (the service method, delegating to doGet/doPost/etc for http requests). As a result, most applications actually needed another framework on top of servlets to do routing based on request URL and mapping on to some model of server side components, like MVC. See for example struts, spring, webwork and a host of other java frameworks that were around at the time Rails appeared on the scene. At the time, Rails' routes file and having classes grouping related controller methods together was a clear demonstration of what the servlet API had got wrong.

Heck, the architects even designed it as a completely generic request/response framework with http as just one possible protocol. When http is your 99.9% use case, that just smacks of over-engineering.

typicalrunt2• 14 years ago

My mistake, you were intentionally casting a wide net. I see where you are coming from now.

In my time working with Java (14 yrs now...sigh) for simple Web applications, I've never found the need for the majority of the J2EE stack, instead opting for Servlets and...well, just normal Java code. I've had Java gurus throw proverbial books at me for not using EJB and its ilk, but I just don't like how complex it all gets once the full J2EE stack is included.

aGHz4• 14 years ago

1970: "Another part of the necessary art of calling bullshit is to take down good ideas when they become inflated beyond what they can bear. Organizing your instructions in a clear way is a reasonable idea that I support. But there's just not enough there there to dress it up in function calls, machine optimization, and all the other -- here's that word again! -- wankery that passes for muster in the compilers orthodoxy."

1980: "Another part of the necessary art of calling bullshit is to take down good ideas when they become inflated beyond what they can bear. Separating your code in functions that address single concerns is a reasonable idea that I support. But there's just not enough there there to dress it up in models, controllers, views, and all the other -- here's that word again! -- wankery that passes for muster in the MVC orthodoxy."

2010: (and this one's verbatim) "Another part of the necessary art of calling bullshit is to take down good ideas when they become inflated beyond what they can bear. Using URLs instead of IDs in your json responses is a reasonable idea that I support. But there's just not enough there there to dress it up in HATEOAS, HAL, custom mime types, and all the other -- here's that word again! -- wankery that passes for muster in the hypermedia orthodoxy."

I never could understand this attitude of overt antagonism towards people who care about architecture. If you aren't partial to such discussions yourself, at least show some respect for the people who, through years of wankerous discussion and debate, came up with and subsequently refined the pattern that propelled you to fame (or in the case of us mortals, at least gave us the tools to make our programming life a little easier). Now, I understand this particular guy is deeply invested in the MVC architecture. But that doesn't mean history stops here. REST (despite a long but somewhat underground history) and hypermedia are still in their infancy as an architecture. Many, many problems still remain unsolved and the process of debate meant to distill the good from the bad necessarily looks to outsiders as "wankery". Still, show some respect. The next person of Heinemeier's caliber will likely make their fame by bringing REST to the masses.

dhh3• 14 years ago

Not every new architectural idea is a good one. Lots fell by the wayside over the years. See J2EE or Naked Objects (I actually kinda liked that one). Bad ideas fail faster when criticism is brought forward which opens the floor to new, better ideas.

aGHz4• 14 years ago

Constructive criticism, yes absolutely. Labelling things as wankery and reiterating that you don't see the point aren't. All they're showing is that you're missing the point.

aGHz4• 14 years ago

I should probably mention, before it's pointed out, that I mean REST is still in its infancy for web apps. It's more than proven itself as an excellent system architecture through the www.

rhizome4• 14 years ago

Frank Lloyd Wright's designs are famous for having leaky roofs.

regularfry2• 14 years ago

> Now, I understand this particular guy is deeply invested in the MVC architecture. But that doesn't mean history stops here.

DHH himself has said that Rails MVC is not classical MVC. I don't know if Rails was the first framework to use this particular definition of MVC, but drawing a line between 1980's MVC and Rails is tenuous at best. Making a historical argument on this basis just doesn't hold up.

smoyer• 14 years ago

Or the hatred of other languages and frameworks? JEE (or J2EE as it is called in the article was truly both bloated and difficult to configure before adopting the "convention over configuration" ideal. But it's a very pleasant way to develop applications now.

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly with with dhh's stated philosophy on the fact that code talks, bullshit walks and writing "future proof" code is a terrible idea (one that virtually every journeyman developer stupidly clings to for a while at some point in their career). But at the same time I'm not a Ruby fan, in large part due to the monkey patching ability he holds so dear.

Given the same philosophical outlook but perhaps less inherent trust in developers (including myself!) to always do the Right Thing, I've come to really appreciate Go as a no-bullshit language that does allow you to hang yourself (eg. the unsafe package, ability to ignore error returns via '_' variables, etc) but it at least makes you tie the rope to the ceiling before you can use it, so you have time to think about whether or not you really want to use it.

The Parley Letter

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