Humility and Advocacy
Posted by Rick DeNatale Wed, 13 Sep 2006 15:43:00 GMT
Two interesting web pages just came up on the ruby-talk list.
Humility – The Path to Learning
Paul Lutus, who recently posted something to the list, and later admitted that he was mistaken about a technical point. This was rightly called out as an unusual occurence on mailing lists, even the well-mannered ruby-talk.He pointed out that he had a “vested interest” in admitting his mistakes. And pointed to His article on narcissism. Too many denizens of the “network” nation exhibit symptoms of believing that they are the smartest guy in the room.
As I’ve said here before, I believe in loosely holding strong opinions. That is when I find, or am presented with evidence which runs counter to one of my opinions, I have to reconsider, and if the evidence is compelling, change or drop the opinion in question. It’s a personal version of the scientific method.
Would that, more programmers, pundits, politicians, and folks in other walks of life follow this practice.
While I often state these strong opinions, well strongly, it’s always in the hope of stirring discussion, so as to continue learning.
Advocacy, vs. Open-Minds
Another good article is Mark-Jason Dominus’ essay about why he hates language advocacy.
Although this article is over 5 years old, and is written for an audience of Perl programmers, it’s a worthwhile read for fans of Ruby, or any other programming language.
His points are that we can learn from other communities, and that taking the stance that “my tribe is better!” shuts off that learning, and alienates those who get the impression that because an advocate of language L, say that idea I is unimportant because it’s outside of standard practice in L, that L is incapable of supporting idea I.
Far better to understand I, and how to either express or incorporate it into L, so that those ‘needing’ it, and the advocate both understand each other.
