Wednesday 6 May 2009

Seaside - amateurish circle-jerk mentality ?

There were two comments given to my posts, which could explain the problems of Seaside from a completely different perspective and much better than I did:

Richard Kulisz commented my post "Seaside standing outperforms facts":

"It seems Seaside has been infected with the same amateurish circle-jerk mentality that's corrupted Squeak from which it was spawned. It also seems to me that this has little to do with national differences and everything to do with professional vs amateur efforts. In professional circles, standards vary from place to place, but in amateur circles (eg, FLOSS) they seem to be uniformly poor."

Richard also commented my post: "Laws of life in a community":

"The conscious or unconscious selection of Leaders and their defense at all costs is a normal (even if utterly repugnant, vile and disgusting) part of every community. I've been in quite a few and I've observed this behaviour in nearly all of them. The Creators always, ALWAYS get defended.

In the case of programmers, no community of programmers can ever be diverse enough to avoid appointing gods. Wiki wiki (c2) wasn't. It's because programmers are on the whole nothing but mindless robots incapable of genuinely original thought. What's worse, the overwhelming majority LIKE this status quo.

Also, in the case of programmers, the Creator is almost always going to be a member of the community. This creates incestuous inbreeding, up to and including mutated deformed offspring."

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Well, Richard, thank you very much for these interesting and valuable aspects. I feel that there is a lot of truth in these words, although I cannot judge myself, because Seaside is my first and only "community project" experience. Not a good one, though. Nor did I ever use Squeak beyond a little playing.

It all sounds very logical - taking into account that most people choose being part of a herd, a malfunction that I have never suffered from.

Seeing Seasiders as amateurish sheeples is an interesting aspect, which explains the fierce rejection of my proposals by most, without even discussing the technical facts. And it also explains why my heretic blasphemy of their gods made all my good technical arguments worthless for them.

Thank you for these insights, which, in essence, is much stronger a critique than mine.

6 comments:

  1. Well, the original creators always deserve a certain amount of respect, for they created something.

    On the state of Squeak: I think it is an aimless pile of garbage intermingled with brilliant ideas. In the time I have watched the mailing lists, two new forks came up, both of them dividing the "Squeak community" even more.

    Sooner or later, every single squeaker will have his own fork. Then it will be truly dead.

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  2. ...unless somebody takes a few Euros and adds a modern Windows or Next like UI to give VisualWorks some competition and to make it suitable for real products.

    I once met an ex ParcPlace guy who claimed that this could be done. I don't know. But as long as there is no proper GUI that end-users like, Squeak remains a toy for the boys.

    And "respect" is something else.

    I agree to "a certain amount of respect" - but we are not in Japanese culture here (as much as I respect JAP culture).

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  3. A ParcPlace guy talking about Squeak? Sorry, not really the best of authorities there.

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  4. | the original creators always deserve a certain amount of respect, for they created something.

    I strongly disagree with that attitude. Creation is only worthy of acknowledgment, never mind respect, if it's both original (and Squeak isn't) and positive. No sane person respects serial killers for their creation of death. Don't even try to make an entirely arbitrary and artificial distinction between creation and destruction. And you can only judge a contribution as positive within the context of possible alternative contributions. Within that context, Squeak isn't positive and isn't worthy of respect. The same thing for Wikipedia (which at least was original) and many other projects.

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  5. Actually, I came here because I was forcefully reminded that Crazylanders love to consign their children to the ritual abuse of a caste system (so-called "nerds" and "jocks") in concentration camps (called "high schools"). This is important here NOT because Crazy programmers are mere victims who didn't get the chance to participate in the ritual abuse. On the contrary, I bring it up to point out how steeped in this psychopathic behaviour Crazies are as adults, to such an extent that Crazy adults never really grow out of high school. And this is significant because jocks grow up into the real world and then slam into the harsh reality that adult society doesn't tolerate physical abuse. But nerds never grow out of dishing out verbal abuse since their sick excuse for a society rewards them for it. It also rewards the formation of hierarchies and cliques of all kinds and the abuse of underlings.

    American programmers are on the whole elitist shits. Only the strictures of professional life keep their elitist contemptuous behaviour partially constrained. Which neatly explains why amateur software projects (and their communities) suck. We are talking about a culture which produces more than twice the rate of psychopaths as other cultures. And we're talking about a subset of the population that takes pride in being contemptuous of others, of anyone different from them.

    Hmmm, I thought the pseudo-psychopathic derangement of Americans would steer away from my theory about professional vs amateur projects. Apparently not.

    Note, the only community I've participated in which seemed flat was essembly.com. I think the creators of the site were referenced once in all the time I was there and that was when I was bitching about the software's features. Otherwise, they were invisible and I never saw them participate.

    Any community whose subject of interest is somebody's work is going to anoint that person as a god. This is inevitable. At least it's inevitably for Americans, who are on the whole deeply deranged and disturbing. They love hierarchy, they love to play tops & bottoms, doms & subs. They WORSHIP tops and doms. That's why they're so religious; Jehovah is the ultimate top. It's why they have a Fascist Party and "right-wing non-fascist" (ie, liberal) is a curse word.

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  6. I would recommend reading Le Misanthrope by Moliere. It is neither American nor modern yet still relevant.

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