> You've started with a fallacy here. No one is getting paid to push smalltalk.
I wasn't using the word 'advertise' to suggest he was getting paid to push it. I was using it in very much the same sense in which you use the word 'sell' here:
> To be honest it doesn't seem that you are arguing against this concept that strongly, you're just not overly sold on it.
To which I respond: Correct. I'd even go so far as to say I'm not arguing against the concept at all.
Considering that all sorts of approaches to software development continue to be extremely popular, including among very smart people, it just seems crazy to me that people get so acrimonious about such issues. Programming is a very wide and varied field. If two developers try something and come away with differing opinions of it, isn't it just possible that those different opinions are both informed, but informed by different experience resulting from working in different problem domains? I'd submit that developers don't give each other nearly enough credit when they offhandedly dismiss each other's sharing of their own practical experience as "FUD".
To bring it back to Kay's paper: He's got some very interesting ideas, but the specific examples he talks about are problems that just don't cause me any stress in my day job. Yet he implies that people in my problem domain are suffering for not using his preferred programming paradigm. Now I don't want to accuse him of attacking me, and I certainly don't want to attack him because I believe that paper represents learned speculation and not a stake in the ground. But it remains true that he's not necessarily coming from the same place that everyone else is, and his experience of what works well does not necessarily translate into a universal best practice.
I wasn't using the word 'advertise' to suggest he was getting paid to push it. I was using it in very much the same sense in which you use the word 'sell' here:
> To be honest it doesn't seem that you are arguing against this concept that strongly, you're just not overly sold on it.
To which I respond: Correct. I'd even go so far as to say I'm not arguing against the concept at all.
Considering that all sorts of approaches to software development continue to be extremely popular, including among very smart people, it just seems crazy to me that people get so acrimonious about such issues. Programming is a very wide and varied field. If two developers try something and come away with differing opinions of it, isn't it just possible that those different opinions are both informed, but informed by different experience resulting from working in different problem domains? I'd submit that developers don't give each other nearly enough credit when they offhandedly dismiss each other's sharing of their own practical experience as "FUD".
To bring it back to Kay's paper: He's got some very interesting ideas, but the specific examples he talks about are problems that just don't cause me any stress in my day job. Yet he implies that people in my problem domain are suffering for not using his preferred programming paradigm. Now I don't want to accuse him of attacking me, and I certainly don't want to attack him because I believe that paper represents learned speculation and not a stake in the ground. But it remains true that he's not necessarily coming from the same place that everyone else is, and his experience of what works well does not necessarily translate into a universal best practice.