May the Best Attitudes wins...

I came across this quote in a forum. Someone posted this question about the choice of hiring someone who has...

1) Excellent skillset, poor Attitude 

2) Excellent Attitude, average skillset.
Who would be your choice and why ?? 

Who would you hire and why?. I think the best answer is posted by someone with a quote from Charles Swindoll:

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company... a church... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our Attitudes.”

-Charles R. Swindoll

Myth of the Genius Developer

I came across this posting "Myth of the Genius Programmer" today.
This is a very well presented Google IO video presentation.
I strong encourage  you or your development team  to take time to watch this video.
Also, a good video to watch if you are hiring developers.
If your team has the following traits:

 1. Resistant to code review...
 2. Tribal knowledge that few knows...
 3. Existence of "hero" developers("elitism")....
 4. Reluctant to help each other...
 5. Has low project productivity....
 6. No visibility...
 7. Skill rots over time...
etc.
Recognize yourself or your team with these traits?
Then its time to change or get out.

Quote from above video:

"There is a pervasive elitism at work in the programming community. Add anonymity to the mix, and everyone is suddenly  elite."

Search Engines and energy consumption: Deja Vu

Google is in the news again. This time for something more salient:  Google Energy LLC.

At the heart of the Internet search giant is its humongous energy consumptions. Make no mistake, every web pages indexed, ranked and sorted requires computing power. Factor in the upcoming  cloud computing data centers, could this be the new "Big Autos" T-models-equivalent of the 21st century? Deja Vu.
You can't get something for nothing. You can't defy the Laws of  Physics. Extracting information from the web requires energy. Maybe its high time that we have a  web efficiency energy rating of some sort?
For Google to enter into searching, indexing and storing of all imaginable digitized media,
the energy consumption can only go up and not down. More social sites and probably more specialized sites will spring up to take advantage and harvest newly available info: explosion in "infomation plantations".
That in turn means more energy consumptions. More oils and coals. And more CO2.
This raises the issue of Cloud Computing's carbon footprint. ElasticVapor has an article on this that sums it up succintly:

"Then there is the question of consumption, we now have the ability to run our applications on thousands of servers, but previously this wasn't even possible. To say it another way, we can potentially use several years worth of energy in literary a few hours, where previously this wasn't even an option. So in direct contrast, hypothetically we're using more resources, not less. On the flip side, if we bought those thousand servers and had them running (under utilized) the power usage would be significantly higher. But then again, buying those servers would have been out reach for most, so it's not a fair comparison. There we are -- back, at where we started. You may use 80% less energy per unit, but have 1000% more capacity which at the end of the day means you're using more, not less energy."

Functional Language: Gut feelings

In my last post, I written about my email to Barbara Liskov and raised some issues about Functional language.
I let out my feeling that something is not "right". That gut feeling.
Today, I came across Ted Neward's blog post on his 2010 prediction.
One of  his 2010 crystall ball point  seems to resonate with what I was trying to express then.

Quote:

"... functional languages will start to see a backlash. I hate to say it, but "getting" the functional mindset is hard, and there's precious few resources that are making it easy for mainstream (read: O-O) developers make that adjustment, far fewer than there was during the procedural-to-object shift. If the functional community doesn't want to become mainstream, then mainstream developers will find ways to take functional's most compelling gateway use-case (parallel/concurrent programming) and find a way to "git 'er done" in the traditional O-O approach, probably through software transactional memory, and functional languages like Haskell and Erlang will be relegated to the "What Might Have Been" of computer science history. Not sure what I mean? Try this: walk into a functional language forum, and ask what a monad is. Nobody yet has been able to produce an answer that doesn't involve math theory, or that does involve a practical domain-object-based example. In fact, nobody has really said why (or if) monads are even still useful. Or catamorphisms. Or any of the other dime-store words that the functional community likes to toss around."

I would hate to see Functional Language assuming the status of  Brahminian dialect, like Latin.
But again, who is to say folks are not motivated to learn and master Latin?

Veni. Vedi. Vici. 

On Barbara Liskov's Power of Abstraction, Functional language and PCP

Barbara Liskov  OOPSLA keynote at InfoQ site is worth listening to. 

She is best known for formulating the Liskov Substitution Principle(LSP)

Her presentation is very clear and well-delivered.

She's is not convinced of functional programming and emphasized readability and hinted  that DSLs could introduced cacophony into the language landscape.

Managed yesterday to fire off an email to her about some concerns I have about Functional language. After all,  I have begin to dip into Clojure for a few weeks now.

I got a reply this morning.

The gist is that readability may not be an issue with Functional languages but it could be due to something else. I felt that something is not natural or right. Maybe its my time and familiarity with Object-Oriented language for long time?. Or is it a paradigm change?.

Could Functional language be walking down the metaphor road of the new Sorcerer's Apprentice?

"That old sorcerer has vanished
And for once has gone away!
Spirits called by him, now banished,
My commands shall soon obey.
Every step and saying
That he used, I know,
And with sprites obeying
My arts I will show"

I don't know but I hope  PCP ("praise, certainty and perfection") is not at work. 

Only time will tell. Meanwhile, I got a copy of "Programming F#" by Chris Smith and started to read it for comparison with Clojure.