Prior the Internet days (some people talk about prior television), we had different villages, local ones, with no communication. Now, we live in a global village. We need to communicate and share knowledge, even in different languages and cultures. Furthermore, we learned it is not just us and the "my limited world", but any thing we do affects the globality.

Now, when working on a real world problem, working to find a solution of course, we need to communicate and all or our work is to complement the one from others. There is no one single person that fights all the villains and the rest of the team observes and cheers.

Solving a problem with a software intensive system, involves working with all parts of the system: Hardware, Software, people and processes. No one lives alone with its computer, everybody interacts with all the other components of the system, and the developers are part of that system too!.

Making sense of that, the strategy of working only in my local line forgetting there is something beyond that, goes back to the local world and denies globality. Does it mean you need to work all at the same time? No. It means you work in your local line knowing there is something bigger of which that line is an important part.

What does this matter in Steve Yegge’s post about NOOBs? Well, going extreme, the post indicates there is much waste, fat we need to remove to be healthy. The comments, even the modeling and describing language structures are needless for the seasoned, non-noob programmer. I agree, as long as the programmer is working in a system that has only two components: the programmer and his lines of code.

Unfortunately, that is not the reality. A system not only requires the work of many other components, some non-software and some non-programmers, but also requires all those components to communicate at design and execution time. Robert Martin once said that one of the software functions is actually communicate with people, readers that may have not participated in the development. Does that mean the comments should stay? Not exactly, but that the code itself should be readable, understandable.

One way of doing that, for the development group, is using sentences that make sense and do the function (you can scramble the sentences and do the same thing but being not readable).

Globalization in the System means all components will need to communicate and work with other components. Creating the product with those characteristics, because they are needed, is not being NOOB, but being aware of the fact the software is not an island.

William Martinez.

Paul pointed me to a TSS post I missed. Steve Yegge posted some rants about complexity and got to a conclusion about the how good and clean are scripting languages (Portrait of a NOOB ).

I couldn’t post a comment to it, since it was already closed to comments. So I guess I will answer here.

In this first part of a response to that blog, I will reproduce the post I did to TSS. Probably nobody read it since I posted it one month later.

First, let’s summarize Steve’s post (or what I understood of it):
1. Comments are metadata. Metadata is of no use for the compiler, so it can be get rid of.
2. Noobs are comment obsessed creatures, thus metadata enthusiastics.
3. Modeling is a way to comment intention of code in code language itself. So modeling a metadata creation process.
4. Teenagers are obsessive modelers.
5. Classes and in general OO, are metadata in code itself.
6. Static typing is also metadata since the real thing is memory afterwards.
7. Seasoned Programmer is one enlighten creature that does not use metadata, and thus can see the real thing when coding, not ethereal domain models.

What do I agree with:
Metadata is useless for the compiler. True.
Modeling is a metadata creation process. True.

What do I disagree with:
Metadata (at least not all) is not useless. Metadata is important, although not for the compiler.

Probably one of the things Steve Yegge misses in the post is that a language has much more than just telling the compiler what to do. In the DSL post, we talk about languages oriented to one specific domain, using vocabulary and grammar of that domain only. The idea is languages are there to help you solve a real life problem, not to help the compiler. Languages are for you (and your peers), not for the machine. And maybe not all languages are meant for a computer to read them.

Furthermore: Lack of metadata does not mean better code.

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