
David Heinemeier Hansson step aside, Paul Graham is next to be voted off the island - raganwald
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/01/david-heinemeier-hansson-step-aside.html
======
gruseom
_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
> contentless techfan wordfluff

A very competitive segment of the marketplace of hot air.

------
bfioca
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?

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

~~~
bfioca
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.

------
bayareaguy
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.

~~~
icky
> 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? ;-)

~~~
sammyo
> (Did I miss any? ;-)

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

~~~
Zak
Arc has been out for _days_ and they're not done with it yet?!

------
eVizitei
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). :-)

------
asdflkj
>promotes the language extensively

>relentless self-promotion

When and how did that happen?

~~~
bdr
Seriously, what self-promotion?

~~~
pg
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.

~~~
mynameishere
A lot of your essays praise "hackers" relentlessly, with the understanding
that you are talking largely about yourself and your circle.

~~~
pg
I don't know about this argument. What I'm praising is a way of approaching
life. It seems natural that one would oneself approach life in a way one
praised.

That seems different from praising something one is merely born with, like
being English or white or male. You don't find me doing that.

~~~
raganwald
This is exactly the way I've always taken your description of hacking. And
your praise for the YCombinator startups usually talks about how hard they
work, for example talking about how much code they write in a short period of
time while living on Ramen noodles.

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DanielBMarkham
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. :)

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

~~~
boucher
I think Steve and Apple is a horrible comparison here.

