Hello everyone. I am assuming I am not alone in this opinion, but since no one else has said this yet, I wanted to drop a few comments out there about the current JVM language discussions that seem to be ravaging the forum. I have my asbestos suit on already, plus I did a sanity check with a couple of trusted advisors before writing this. My hope is that some of these considerations will ring true and help to raise the tone of conversations taking place.
My feeling is that there is far too much negativity in the discussions, and even in the titles, of many of the threads currently on the group. I have been surprised several times by the vitriol in many of these threads. <HippyMode> My own belief is that there is little point in trying to convince people to not learn or use a particular language (take your pick) and that doing so is a harmful act. Why do you personally care if someone else chooses to expend their energy in learning some particular language, or library, or beekeeping, or anything else for that matter? Why is it so important to convince the world that language X is bad and should not be used, or cannot possibly have a future. I would much rather see positive discussions around languages and libraries, and how they solve problems that we all see right now. This is equally true for Groovy, Clojure, Ruby, Python, Scala, Java closures, and ideas like Lombok, Java.next and other solutions to problems we have identified in our current tools and practices. They all have their trade-offs which at this stage are pretty well understood and repeating them endlessly seems to only drive more of a wedge between people, rather than leading to a healthy discussion about what can be learned from each and all of these options. In particular I find it very discouraging to read the kind of negativity or defeatism that seems to be attempting to spread fear about even trying to learn another language. Recently Scala has been the recipient of the worst of this in the Posse groups, but I remember similar discussions (and bad feelings) about Lombok when it came out - as you may recall we chose to focus on the positives rather than the negatives on the show. To strengthen my statement, I believe that developers should constantly try to expand their knowledge and skills. Recent discussions that may or may not have been taken out of context (it's a point of view, not a fact, whether they were or weren't) about good vs. bad developers does align with this one thing I believe - a good developer is constantly striving to improve him/herself through learning, being open to new ideas, trying stuff out, and investing intellectual capital into learning stuff which may or may not turn out to be important in the long run. Looking back at my own learning path, I would be hard pressed to identify anything at all that I regret spending time learning. This includes learning Groovy (still my macro language of choice and almost always a better choice for configuration needs than XML), XML (even in light of the previous statement, as a structured data format XML is still heaps better than the world was before XML, when everything was either CSV or some kind of proprietary data format were things like column positions mattered). Add to that Clojure which I have been learning recently (easier since I did so much with emacs lisp and even a little scheme back in the day, and I am starting to really appreciate the power of an STM mechanism embedded at the core of a language). Ruby, which along with being kind of a neat language convinced me of the huge value of Koans as a way of learning. Python which I have loved for as long as Java, and lots more stuff I can remember. </HippyMode> OK - now that the Kumbaya shit is out of the way, I am going to ask that people try and keep a more respectful tone in their postings and see if we can't produce something a bit more constructive out of these discussions rather than the current trend of more and more bad feeling. Recommendations: Try asking yourselves a few questions before giving in to that knee- jerk reaction. Does this point need to be repeated again or has it been covered enough? Why am I writing this? To Educate, or to try and impose my opinion or my view onto someone else? (yes, I understand the irony of this statement given this posting, but frankly I have held off writing this as long as I could stand hoping that the situation would sort itself out, now I am not sure it will without some effort). Why do you care if someone else wants to spend their time using (or not using) language X? How many of us actually do something because of a "hard sell", versus feeling even less likely to give it a go because of the negative energies already associated with it? Are you really comfortable with disrespecting someone publicly in this forum because of a difference of opinion, however passionately you might believe differently? and as final considerations Is there some way I can say this based on facts and positive criticism, rather than something which, if I am honest, is my opinion? Would I say this to someone, in this way, if face to face with them instead of typing it into a web app? Now - all of this is my opinion as well - feel free to ignore it. We are not about to start moderating anything on the groups (apart from the obvious spam of course), but I don't like the current signal to noise ratio trend here personally and I am betting that others are being put off by it as well. During JavaOne I was very impressed at the level and tone of many of the conversations that took place. The scripting bowl, for example, was overall very friendly and positive - for a while there I thought I might end up representing Groovy as well as Scala because Guillaume got sick. Graeme Rocher did a much better job than I would have, but I would have absolutely represented Groovy as well as I possibly could because ultimately I don't care what other people learn as long as it keeps them learning. Likewise, Andres Almiray's polyglot talk was extremely classy, talking about the practical issues of multiple languages on a project, and not a hint of you should or shouldn't use this language, or this one is better than that one. Perhaps people are simply more civil when they are face to face (scratch that, I know that is the case). Either way, I am sorry to say that I enjoyed the language discussions I had at JavaOne far more than I have enjoyed reading these threads on the Posse group recently, and in many ways that prompted this posting. Thanks for reading Dick -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
