I think Dave Winer's "A note to C developers" is one of the better pieces he's written, with one "fatal flaw". I s'pose I like it because he's made a lot of same observations I've also had. Perhaps the mistake was intentional? Perhaps, it was written in the same manner that Zen artists would create "the perfect art", and put in an intentional mistake to show that nothing, in life, is perfect...
I, too, have long decried the priesthood of programmers. Worked alongside of many people, both programmers and others, who wanted to act like gods... This is prevalent among programmers, in the past, because so few could learn to do it. Those who knew very little got great-paying jobs.. those who were mediocre got great career-ladders.
It's a problem that's endemic to the industry. It's why 3 out of 4 IT projects crash and burn, and also explains why much of what comes out of the IT industry makes no sense whatsoever.
I never liked this attitutude that many people have: they know something about computers, so they think they know about all there is to know... Because I never had much self-confidence until just lately, and kept finding that those with the most swagger got listened to, whether they knew what they were talking about or not...
Then I inadvertantly ended up running the department of a $200M company, and I had to interview a lot of folks with this attitude, and had to hire a few of them.
I, personally, think C stinks as a programming language for business applications, and Java is just more of the same... I'm in an extremely small minority, however. I actually think Dave was referring to the difference between a procedural language and a scripting language, but I don't see those differences as being as significant as he does...
The "fatal flaw" I referred to above was in the last paragraph... Dave falls into the same trap I've seen a lot of folks fall into. There IS such a thing as enlightenment. Talking about "a path to enlightenment" (even in lower case) in this context demeans the word...
People bandy the word enlightenment pretty much the same way they use the word genious. Someone gets a few brainstorms, and they're a "genious". Someone gets a few insights, and they're "on the path to enlightenment", and therefore can tell when others are on that path...
Unfortunately, their aren't that many that qualify, in the true sense of the words... If there were that many geniouses and enlightened people, would the world be in the shape it's in...?
1:19:35 PM 
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