Essays

ОглавлениеДобавить в закладки К обложке

9 Time

The last ingredient a popular language needs is time. No one wants to write programs in a language that might go away, as so many programming languages do. So most hackers will tend to wait until a language has been around for a couple years before even considering using it.

Inventors of wonderful new things are often surprised to discover this, but you need time to get any message through to people. A friend of mine rarely does anything the first time someone asks him. He knows that people sometimes ask for things that they turn out not to want. To avoid wasting his time, he waits till the third or fourth time he's asked to do something; by then, whoever's asking him may be fairly annoyed, but at least they probably really do want whatever they're asking for.

Most people have learned to do a similar sort of filtering on new things they hear about. They don't even start paying attention until they've heard about something ten times. They're perfectly justified: the majority of hot new whatevers do turn out to be a waste of time, and eventually go away. By delaying learning VRML, I avoided having to learn it at all.

So anyone who invents something new has to expect to keep repeating their message for years before people will start to get it. We wrote what was, as far as I know, the first web-server based application, and it took us years to get it through to people that it didn't have to be downloaded. It wasn't that they were stupid. They just had us tuned out.

The good news is, simple repetition solves the problem. All you have to do is keep telling your story, and eventually people will start to hear. It's not when people notice you're there that they pay attention; it's when they notice you're still there.

It's just as well that it usually takes a while to gain momentum. Most technologies evolve a good deal even after they're first launched-- programming languages especially. Nothing could be better, for a new techology, than a few years of being used only by a small number of early adopters. Early adopters are sophisticated and demanding, and quickly flush out whatever flaws remain in your technology. When you only have a few users you can be in close contact with all of them. And early adopters are forgiving when you improve your system, even if this causes some breakage.

There are two ways new technology gets introduced: the organic growth method, and the big bang method. The organic growth method is exemplified by the classic seat-of-the-pants underfunded garage startup. A couple guys, working in obscurity, develop some new technology. They launch it with no marketing and initially have only a few (fanatically devoted) users. They continue to improve the technology, and meanwhile their user base grows by word of mouth. Before they know it, they're big.

The other approach, the big bang method, is exemplified by the VC-backed, heavily marketed startup. They rush to develop a product, launch it with great publicity, and immediately (they hope) have a large user base.

Generally, the garage guys envy the big bang guys. The big bang guys are smooth and confident and respected by the VCs. They can afford the best of everything, and the PR campaign surrounding the launch has the side effect of making them celebrities. The organic growth guys, sitting in their garage, feel poor and unloved. And yet I think they are often mistaken to feel sorry for themselves. Organic growth seems to yield better technology and richer founders than the big bang method. If you look at the dominant technologies today, you'll find that most of them grew organically.

This pattern doesn't only apply to companies. You see it in sponsored research too. Multics and Common Lisp were big-bang projects, and Unix and MacLisp were organic growth projects.

10 Redesign

"The best writing is rewriting," wrote E. B. White. Every good writer knows this, and it's true for software too. The most important part of design is redesign. Programming languages, especially, don't get redesigned enough.

To write good software you must simultaneously keep two opposing ideas in your head. You need the young hacker's naive faith in his abilities, and at the same time the veteran's skepticism. You have to be able to think how hard can it be? with one half of your brain while thinking it will never work with the other.


-= 20 =-
Регистрация.
Забыли пароль?
Логин
Пароль
Запомнить меня