caught somewhere between now & why

I toyed with the idea of just calling this post “Inflammatory Title.” It would be just as apt. The truth is I do care what you use: PHP, Perl, Ruby, Node.js, .NET (just kidding, if you use .NET you’re dead to me). But sometimes following Hacker News feels like a day at the playground in kindergarten.

“You’re stupid.”

“I know you are, but what am I?”

Let’s go back

Before I get in too deep, let me say that I learn a lot (A LOT) from the posts on HN. Few days go by where I’m not introduced to something new—a tool, paradigm, method, best practice, whatever—that I didn’t know existed before. I love filling up my Instapaper account with the best sounding headlines.

But as a relative newcomer to the club, I am only recently starting to see the trend of this point/counterpoint style of blogging. Someone posts an essay berating the transgressions of PHP. As a long-time PHP dev, I feel tempted to chime in with my reasons why most of those points, while excellent and true, are not necessarily good enough reasons to jump off of a ship that has taken you this far. But I don’t need to.

Tomorrow I know that I can open up HN and see another post extolling the virtues of PHP—and throwing in a couple of friendly jabs at the last post, you know, for good measure.

This kind of back-and-forth happens over and over, sometimes with multiple rounds from multiple fighters in a tap out-style cage match, but instead of a bell to end the fight there’s the next controversy to grab our attention.

Your Arguing Makes Me Stronger

This post isn’t an indictment. Nor am calling for a change of the HN ethos. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong. But this is just a friendly reminder: you can be right and wrong … at the same time. If there’s anything I’ve garnered from these volleys it’s that they work best when they do not try to present as fact one’s opinion. 

Yes, use facts to back up your statements. But don’t expect that to change anything. You may win a few converts, and well done! But the majority of readers will walk away—at best—saying, “Yep, that’s right. But I’m still gonna use <insert today’s hated language here>.” I recognize the pitfalls of using PHP, more fully since I’ve read the excellent and rather lengthy treatise by Eevee. But I also know that I use a framework that limits my liability (in the sense of not having to remember every pitfall), and I can build a full, fast and functional website in a couple of hours. And it will work … and work. Could I do that in Rails? Or Python? Sure, but then I’d have to learn Rails or Python—something that’s on my list of things to do, and probably will be for some time to come.

So What About That?

So my point is this, let’s keep arguing. Let’s keep making each other better. And let’s remember that none of us (yet) have the silver bullet. In fact all any of us possess is our own smoking gun which proves our own culpability in our own personal list of crimes—some admittedly larger than others (I’m talking to myself).

Cheers,
Josh

If you don’t have any opinions about anything, you should follow me on Twitter.

Obama and the GOP’s War on Cool

Karl Rove’s PAC took out an ad attacking Obama for being “cool.” I don’t even feel the need to make a counter argument, but Gawker provides an unusually enjoyable commentary on this.

And if you’re someone already incensed by the president’s pretensions to “cool,” well then what the fuck is UP, committed Republican voter? Let’s fist-bump terrorist-wise. Booooosh!