Ego-Driven Technologies

Last week – while still on the other side of the pond – I attended a meet-up organized by the local Google Developers Group. The meeting included a presentation about Go, aimed mostly at newcomers, which covered the language from the ground up but at very fast pace. This spurred a lot of survey questions, as people evidently wanted to assess the language’s viability in general and fitness for particular domain of applications.
One of them was about web frameworks that are available to use in Go. Answer mentioned few simple, existing ones, but also how people coming from other languages are working to (re)build their favorite ones in Go. The point was, of course, that even though the language does not have its own Django or Rails just yet, it’s bound to happen quite soon.

And that’s when it dawned on me.

See, I wondered for a while now why people are eager to subject themselves to a huge productivity drop (among other hardships) when they switch from one technology, that they are proficient in, to a different but curiously similar one.
Mind you, I’m not talking about exploratory ventures intended to evaluate language X or framework Y by doing one or two non-trivial projects; heck, I do it very often (and you should too). No, I’m talking about all-out switching to a new shiny toy, especially when decided consciously and not through a gradual slanting, in a kind of “best tool for the job” fashion.

Whenever I looked for justification, usually I’d just find a straightforward litany of perks and benefits of $targetTechnology, often having a not insignificant intersection with analogous list for the old one. Add the other, necessary part of risk-benefit calculation – drawbacks – and it just doesn’t balance out. Not by a long shot.

So, I notice that I am confused. There must some be other factor in play, but I couldn’t come up with any candidates – until that day.
As I speculate now, there is actually a big incentive to jump ship whenever a new one appear. And it seems to be one of dirty secrets of the hacker community, because it directly questions the esteemed notion of meritocracy that we are so eager to flaunt.

Hello World Fallacy

These days you cannot make more than few steps on the Web before tripping over yet another wonderful framework, technology, library, platform… or even language. More often that not they are promising heaven and stars: ease of use, flexibility, scalability, performance, and so on. Most importantly, they almost always emphasize how easy it is to get started and have working, tangible results – sometimes even whole apps – in very short time.

In many cases, they are absolutely right. With just the right tools, you can make some nice stuff pretty quickly. True, we’re still far from a scenario where you simply choose features you’d like to have, with them blending together automatically – even if some folks make serious leaps in that direction.
But if you think about it for a moment, it’s not something that we actually want, for reasons that are pretty obvious. The less effort is needed to create something, the less value it presents, all other things being equal. We definitely don’t expect to see software development reduced into rough equivalent of clicking through Windows wizards, because everything produced like that would be just hopelessly generic.

But think how easy it would be to get started with that…

And thus we come to the titular issue which I took liberty in calling a “Hello World” Fallacy. It occurs when a well-meaning programmer tries out a new piece of technology and finds how easy it is to do simple stuff in it. Everything seems to fall into place: tutorials are clear, to the point and easy to follow; results appear quickly and are rather impressive; difficulties or setbacks are few and far between. Everything just goes extremely well.. What is the problem, then?

The problem lies in a sort of “halo effect” those early successes are likely to create. While surveying a new technology, it’s extremely tempting to look at the early victories as useful heuristic for evaluating the solution as a whole. We may think the way particular tech makes it easy to produce relatively simple apps is a good indicator of how it would work for bigger, more complicated projects. It’s about assuming a specific type of scalability: not necessarily tied to performance of handling heavy load of thousands of users, but to size and complexity of the system handling it.

Point is, your new technology may not really scale all that well. What makes it easy to pick up, among other things, is how good it fits to the simple use cases you will typically exercise when you are just starting out. But this early adequacy is not an evidence for ability to scale into bigger, more serious applications. If anything, it might constitute a feasible argument for the contrary. Newbie-friendliness often goes against long-term usability for more advanced users; compare, for example, the “intuitive” Ribbon UI introduced in relatively recent version Microsoft Office to its previous, much more powerful and convenient interface. While I don’t stipulate it’s a pure zero-sum game, I think catering to beginners and experts alike is surely more difficult than addressing the needs of only one target audience. The former is definitely a road less traveled.

When talking about software libraries or frameworks, the ‘expert’ would typically refer to developer using the tech for large and long-term project. They are likely to explore most of the crooks and crannies, often hitting brick walls that at first may even appear impassable. For them, the most important quality for a software library is its “workaroundability”: how well it performs at not getting in the way between programmer and job done, and how hackable it is – i.e. susceptible to stretching its limits beyond what authors originally intended.

This quality is hardly evident when you’ve only done few casual experiments with your shiny new package. General experience can help a great deal with arriving at unbiased conclusion, and so can the explicit knowledge about the whole issue. While it’s beyond my limited powers to help you significantly to the former, I can at least gently point to the latter.

Happy hacking!