I'm not sure how to express how happy I am that Steve Yegge is back. He's one of my blogging heroes. One of the few bloggers that I'm planning to reread entirely one day, because his writing is just that good. If you've never had the pleasure, don't be put off by the long blog posts. Read them, read them all, they're all amazing.
On the length issue: Honestly, Steve's posts were quite long (much like Paul Graham's). To me, it doesn't matter, because every one of them was worth reading all the way through. It sometimes meant I'd have to leave them for later, but I still read them. He mentions that he believed the length might have been a reason people read his posts. I can't speak for anyone else, but if the quality of his writing stays the same, I don't care how long his posts are, I'm reading them. The day he "retired" was truly a sad day for me.
By the way, I would happily buy a book of his collected writings (ala Hackers and Painters), so I really wish he would make such a book.
He's one of my blogging heroes as well. He inspired me to get out of my C/C++/Java comfort zone and embark on a strange and mind-expanding journey through Ruby, Haskell, Scala, culminating in Clojure. When I got to Clojure, I immediately thought, "by golly, this looks like the Lisp Steve Yegge was searching for!" Can't wait to see his thoughts on Clojure.
Pretty positive, I expect. From the the end of today's post:
> I used to have lot of open, long-standing concerns about the future of programming and productivity, but my sabbatical last year finally brought me some clojure.
I know that negative criticism can hurt, no matter how insignificant or pointless. So to people like Steve Yegge, Joel Spolsky, the 37signal guys, pg, and many others who put part of themselves out there for the benefit of others, I suggest putting things into perspective with this handy formula:
Let n = the number of people whose lives your writing has effected.
Let m = the average magnitude of that effect.
Let e = the distribution effect of your medium (for one on one, e = 1,in a room of others, e = 2, print, e = 3, popular blog or forum, e = 4, etc.)
Let z = the sum of all the negativity of those who don't matter.
Then if the net total effect of your writing is A, we can say:
A = (n*m)**e - z
So, for almost any value of z, A will remain positive. Keep on writing. Please.
There's one thing your analysis is missing: A has a diffuse effect across the entire Internet community; whereas, z directly and personally affects the writer. Even if A >>> z, the impact of z on a writer can still be unpleasant enough that it isn't worth it to them to continue in their work.
I don't understand this. With all of the many people who provide their writings for free on the internet, why even care about somebody whose writing you don't like?
I really don't care for Jeff Atwood's writing, but I don't tell him to change or to stop writing. I don't read his blog.
My only conclusion is that the negative people actually don't give a crap about his writing/style/length/whatever. What they care about is his success and how it shows they don't have it.
> What they care about is his success and how it shows they don't have it.
I think this isn't quite right. In general, the people criticizing him aren't other bloggers who are jealous that he has more readers than them. I think it's simply that they feel he is undeservedly popular, and that his following/influence is out of proportion with his talent. You see this kind of backlash against commercially successful/critically panned art all the time. With a blog, it's one of the few places the commentary gets so close to the art.
[for the record, I like his writing and am glad he's back]
Steve writes, for example: "She was pulling out a giant needle as she told me this. It just sort of materialized from under the table, the way a knife appears in a bar fight. It was a very large needle."
I'd say that's some rather good writing right there.
What exactly is it about Steve's writing that is bad? Bad writers almost never have a following and certainly never have the following that Steve has acquired. I would argue the contrary, that Steve's writing is quite good in that it evokes an emotion in the reader almost without exception. The emotion may be positive or negative but the fact that the emotion exists is evidence that his writing is not bad.
Maybe you disagree with it or maybe you find it objectionably long but those things are different from saying he is a bad writer. I think Steve's critics are typically angry about something he has written about one of their hobby horses but I strongly doubt too many of them are imploring him to write better.
Let's see, the guy who wrote the Da Vinci Code, the lady who writes the Twilight books, Ayn Rand, oh we could go on. Now, if you're willing to redefine the meaning of 'good' to mean 'creates a response' then a lot of bad things can pass for good. But it's the sort of silliness that might evince a response that is not, you know, good.
Dude, unsuccessful writers think people want "good writing" - they don't. They want to be entertained, inspired, informed, distracted, improved, whatever - you don't need a mastery of language to do that. In fact, if you let your mastery of language get in the way of entertaining, inspiring, informing, and otherwise serving people's needs, then that's quite silly.
> But it's the sort of silliness that might evince a response that is not, you know, good.
Start by cutting out words most people don't know. I read between 3 and 10 books per week (closer to 10 lately) and I don't know what "evince" means. Start spending less time looking smart and more time serving people and you'll go much, much further in life.
Ignore this advice if you're secretly a best-selling multi-millionaire author who has inspired a lot of people who don't normally read to pick up a book instead of watch TV. In which case, carry on using the big words to bash other best-selling multi-millionaire authors who are inspiring a lot of people to read who normally don't, and entertaining them for doing so.
Dude, unsuccessful writers think people want "good writing" - they don't
Dude, what does that have to do with anything? The claim was bad writers have no following. Which is not true. That's all.
I read between 3 and 10 books per week (closer to 10 lately) and I don't know what "evince" means
Happy to do my little bit broadening someone's vocabulary.
Ignore this advice
Thanks, I will. Mostly because I don't think I or any of the people I was having a discussion with were asking for advice. But I'll come back and re-read this during my next advice shortage.
>> ...the guy who wrote the Da Vinci Code, the lady who writes the Twilight books, Ayn Rand, oh we could go on.
Shall we call those the Good-Enough-Writers (TM)?
Seriously, truly awful anything do not ever see the daylight. Not even the children of emperors make it to public life if they not manage to make it to average (unless as posers or puppets).
The Da Vinci Code is cheesy, but otherwise well written. Dan Brown is not going to make it to the classics, but is not an idiot either.
Same can be said about Steve Yegge. His writing is opinionated, controversial, and sometimes grammatically incorrect (which I read as a token of informality rather than sheer ignorance). But the guy has a bunch of fresh ideas! You cannot have any good idea if you don't push the limits and throw some crazy shit as byproduct.
The Da Vinci Code is cheesy, but otherwise well written
The Da Vinci Code is so poorly written, it's spawned a minor cottage industry of amusing commentary about how poorly it is written. A good place to start is here:
Take 100 random people who has not read the book, but have seen the movie. Pay each of them to write a novelization of the movie. Take the best 5 "novelizations", and I bet the original will circle around them, with the eyes closed.
Repeat the above experiment, but substitute random people with random English literature mayors. Maybe the average "novelizations" will have fewer grammar errors than the top 5 of the previous experiment... but over all, I still expect the original to be better written than the top 5 of the second experiment.
The guy had a good idea, and executed it well enough to make a success out of it. Get over it!
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get over. The simple statement was that bad writers have no following. This is untrue.
Dan Brown, just to go with our example, is a terrible terrible writer, by just about every imaginable standard of good writing. Dan Brown is a bad writer with a following. Nobody will remember who Dan Brown was 50 or 100 years from now.
Dan Brown is also a tremendously successful writer and you seem to have great difficulty believing, just like the original poster, that a bad writer can be tremendously successful. You also seem to believe that there is some inherent dichotomy between Dan Brown's success and his lack of writing skill. There isn't. That's my entire point.
Dan Brown is a dreadful, highly successful author. There is nothing logically or morally wrong with that. There's no reason there should be. He's simply an excellent counterpoint to the strange notion that bad writers cannot be successful.
P.S. Just for the sake of completeness, it's English majors, not mayors.
" Nobody will remember who Dan Brown was 50 or 100 years from now."
Are you so sure about that? Let's take the most popular mass-writers from the 18th or 19th century and see if they're remembered now:
18th century (US): Susanna Rowson / "Charlotte: A Tale of Truth" - doesn't ring a bell for me, and has a very small Google Search result (60.000)
19th century (US): Harriet Beecher Stowe / "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - I think everyone has heard of it :) and it has 15 times as many results as Susanna Rowson (Dan Brown has 17 times as many as Beecher Stowe, fittingly)
I personally at least recognize most of the bestsellers from the 19th century - probably Arthur Conan Doyle's books or Alexandre Dumas could have been seen to be as bad as Dan Brown in their time (I'm not arguing that they are)
20th century: Agatha Christie - still widely read as I recall.
That could be a bad sign -- I pasted in my lasted blog to the http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514016 from a few days ago, and got Dan Brown. Surely a bug! Then the next two also came up Dan Brown. Doh!
Much like software, television, food, movies, etc, product quality is not the sole determinant of market success. The author who sold more books than anyone else in the United States last year, for example, is a wretchedly poor writer. (Let's just say "Product/market fit covers many sins" and we'll leave it at that.)
"Steve's writing is quite good in that it evokes an emotion in the reader almost without exception."
The fact that it's somewhat formulaic is probably what annoys a lot of people. Personally I enjoy formulaic nonfiction, but almost every writer in the genre has a ton of haters, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, Zed Shaw, etc.
I've had my fair share of code reviews, so I had always assumed that I was adapted to criticism. However, in the process of writing a book I've discovered a whole new level of frustration. To be fair, there have been mistakes put down on the page and I fully expect that they be criticized. However, as soon as the face-to-face aspect of criticism is eliminated people lose their damn minds. I imagine 50 years ago there were boundless trolls writing their screeds to local newspapers. However, thanks to the Internet those guys have no barrier preventing their vitriol. As much as you try to avoid letting it bother you, the constant barrage is exhausting. I can't even imagine what it must be like for someone of Yegge or pg's readership.
As a teen I worked at a record shop. 99% of all customers were nice, courteous, or at worst disregard my existence. However, a single dickweed was all it took to ruin your whole day.
I'm thrilled that Yegge has made peace with the pack of wolves that roam the Internet, seeking to disparage those who... well, who knows their offense? He referenced them in some of his previous posts [0], so I figured they finally got the best of him. I loved reading his missives, and was sad to see them go.
[0] In Story Time, for instance, Steve says "If you read the comments with (Comic Book Guy)'s voice, a lot of them make a whole lot more sense."
Steve Yegge is the one person who comes closest to being singlehandedly responsible for my programming career. Back in high school, I discovered his game, Wyvern, while looking for a way to play Dungeons and Dragons online. At the time, the most prominent feature of the game was its extensibility, via Java and Jython. I made a few game areas and wrote an introductory manual for the world editor tool. Although I never submitted any of my code, the desire to create custom items and monster behaviors was my primary motivation for learning to program.
The inspiration that his blog provides (and the prodding) is much less effective for me. I started a blog. It may have five posts.
It was so great to read this post. It's a bit like an old friend moving back home after living far away for a while. I was always a little disappointed when I would see his blog title dimmed out in my RSS reader as I scrolled on to read things by less engaging bloggers. I think this is a side effect of Steve's blogging style: I feel like I know him personally because of the sheer amount of words he uses to communicate.
This post is a good reminder that these are people you're talking to online (yes, even the "Internet famous"). They're just ordianry people who have the same feelings, needs, and wants as you. Things you say have real, tangible, even powerful effects in the real world. It's easy to forget that with all this virtual stuff in between.
I used to have lot of open, long-standing concerns about the future of programming and productivity, but my sabbatical last year finally brought me some clojure.
Mh, out of Steve Yegge's mouth, that's interesting to hear. I guess emacs is his tool of choice now¹ and Clojure's performance is pretty good from what I've heard.
I've been wondering when he would get to clojure, given how much he has covered lisp and emacs, even going so far as to promote emacs because as "the last stronghold for lisp programmers". Given his involvement with foo camp, and his coverage of other dynamic languages, I thought at times his absence was partly explained just by finally finding something that seemed like such a close fit.
So, the future (of dynamic language tools) is actually the past. I'll have to give it a try - I'm surely interested in seeing what ideas can be stolen for another language's editor.
I thought that Steve's previous analysis that having crazily long posts was part of why they had such a impact was spot on. I'm surprised and disapointed that he's considering consciously making posts shorter and more frequent.
Requested blog post please: "What I have learned at Google".
Given your background/experience it would be interesting to read your thoughts on Google's engineering machine, assuming they let employees blog about it. So far I've seen quite a few entertaining writeups from Nooglers, but mostly college graduates. I wonder what Amazon veteran had to re-learn there.
No, not everyone had an issue with the length of your posts, quite the opposite - it was kind of fun to see a pleasantly small bar in the scrollbar knowing that the treat isn't ending any time soon.
Big fan, big fan here... I once declined a job offer from a company whose engineers never heard of you as I figured out during interviews.
Somehow I feel that the Google doctor would have a pretty good grasp on different forms of RSI. Good that he got help relatively quickly and seems better. But he should really IMNSHO stop playing guitar - typing all day is enough damage to the fingers.
Personally, tuba playing pushed me over the edge, and the only choice I had was to stop working with computers and start teaching. RSI should be taken very, very seriously.
Well and what could you expect from one of the greatest composers coming from the Brazilian musical culture? I accidentally started watching the Proms and was completely obliterated by that performance of Choros nr10, I had never enjoyed classical music that way.
I went back to Steve's list of recommended books, and I noticed that when I first read it I had read one of his recommendations, and now I'm up to eight. Probably my favorite tech blogger.
Yegge plays Villa-Lobos? That's so cool. For those of you who skipped over that part of the post... listen to this etude and tell me it's not badass: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxCR0aMeo8g -- and don't bail before the middle tremolo section at 2:00.
Glad to hear that. Steve Yegge's post I hold dearest to my heart are: Dynamic Languages Strike Back, Rhinos and Tigers and Rhino on Rails (for controversial reasons and the guts to do it more than anything else).
Steve is clearly bright and interesting. So it perplexes me that his blog is adorned with a huge pledge of allegiance to a politician.
*I'd react equally negatively if his blog had a huge Nader or W2004 button on it. I guess I just don't understand the desire people have to idealize authority figures.
TLDR: "I'm back after a year's hiatus from blogging... ramble ramble ramble ... And now that I'm rested up, I believe I'm ready to start tech blogging again... in moderation, anyway. The rest and relaxation and research did wonders for me. I used to have lot of open, long-standing concerns about the future of programming and productivity, but my sabbatical last year finally brought me some clojure[0]."
Is anyone else as torn about long blog posts as I am? On the one hand, I do appreciate good software writing. But I also appreciate concise expressivity, saying more with less. They shouldn't be, and aren't, mutually exclusive.
These days I feel like I'm forced to choose between sacrificing an hour of productive coding to read through a bunch of overly long blog posts at HN and proggit and evaluate whether they were worth reading or not.
The book "Dreaming in Code"[1] can also be summarized in a couple of sentences, but you won't walk away with anything from that summary ... that's literature for you.
Also, sacrificing an hour of productive coding by reading good literature increases the chances that you won't grow up to be a dumb fuck.
Steve's articles may not be of much artistic value, but he combines non-fiction with fiction in a wonderful way, explaining his reasoning through plots and drama :) He gets personal, not being afraid to expose his feelings, and I really wish more people would do that.
Don't misunderstand, I <3 Yegge and am glad he's back. His writing taught me stuff that should have been covered in my undergraduate education, and I still refer new programmers to his 'Tour de Babel' essay.
But am I alone in wishing writers would cut to the chase a little more so as to help their readers reduce the info overload and the task of filtering through it quickly?
It's not hard to spend an entire day reading through only the high-quality tech blogs alone, and find, as Paul mentioned, that you did a lot of 'fake work' and very little real work.
In my opinion, there really aren't too many high-quality tech blogs (or maybe there are, and I'm just not aware of them).
Steve's stuff is lengthy -- but it's also not posted incredibly often (he's not a career blogger), and I have yet to read much by him that wasn't intellectually or creatively satisfying, and afaict that's rather rare for tech-bloggers.
On the length issue: Honestly, Steve's posts were quite long (much like Paul Graham's). To me, it doesn't matter, because every one of them was worth reading all the way through. It sometimes meant I'd have to leave them for later, but I still read them. He mentions that he believed the length might have been a reason people read his posts. I can't speak for anyone else, but if the quality of his writing stays the same, I don't care how long his posts are, I'm reading them. The day he "retired" was truly a sad day for me.
By the way, I would happily buy a book of his collected writings (ala Hackers and Painters), so I really wish he would make such a book.