Subject: RE: [hackers-il] The Professor of Shoe-making Walks Bare-Footed

From: Chen Shapira <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 11:05:04 +0300

> I am not sure the situation is substantially better in the 
> industry. How
> many people do you know that are doing a substantial effort 
> in becoming
> familiar with more and more useful technologies, and keep up 
> to date with
> such stuff?

All of the people I work with, developers from my team, developers from
diffrent products, and marketing people are making a constant effort to
learn new technologies and keep updated. Our workplace subscribes us to
magazines and sends us on courses for this purpose. They will even allow
time for this in our schedules.
We are updating on Java, .NET, new DB techologies (SQL "Boxes"), Zope ,
methodologies, patterns etc.

How many people? I suppose it's about 50 of them.

But note that knowing about new technology doesn't necessarily mean I'm
going to start using it. In fact I'm deeply suspicious of new technologies
and everything cutting edge. I prefer using tried and true methods whenever
I can afford it. I prefer other people to weed the useful stuff from the
hype.

Thanks,
Chen.

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 10:47:50 +0300 (IDT)

> I can afford it. I prefer other people to weed the useful stuff from the

Notice that I did not talk about hypeware. I talked about truly useful
stuff. You do agree that source control (CVS, BitKeeper, Subversion,
whatever) is important, right? Or that having a web-site can no longer be
considered a hype? I am talking about techo-philosophical advancements
rather than purely technological ones. I know that everything that exists
for Perl will be duplicated in Java, .Net, XML and vise-versa in any other
way. But the WWW or Source Control are central concepts which are mature
and useful. Much less MIME.

My point was that don't seem to grok the techno-philosophical advancements
in time. I personally find it a pure line-noise to become familiar with
all the latest hype-technologies of Java/Microsoft/the W3C or whatever. I
don't work with them, so I don't need to know what they are. I use CVS,
and C, and LaTeX, and Perl, and Matlab, and Bash, and X/KDE and Mozilla
and many other tools which I know are mature and useful. I don't have a
policy against cutting-edge technologies, but I'd like to know what is
just a buzzword which I can happily live without and what can actually
deliver potential benefit for me.

I read FM and LWN and SweetCode and other source like that, so I can
become familiar with projects that I don't know about. Many times, I see
line-noise: another editor, another CD encoding front-end, another thing I
can't understand or see what's it good for. But I occasionally encounter
projects that are actually useful, and prove or can prove helpful to me or
others. For the time being, I follow the lazy approach to mastering
technologies: I delay learning something until I actually find a need to
do so.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

There is no IGLU Cabal! They tried to write a product that integrates
J2EE, Java Beans, Perl, Python, Zope, XSLT, .Net, SOAP, XML-RPC, CORBA,
OLE, PHP, Apache, XPath, gnome-conf, Bonobo and KParts. Then they realized
a 1000-line POSIX C program can do exactly what they wanted to do.

> Thanks,
> Chen.
>
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"

---

From: Adi Stav <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 11:14:18 +0300

> My point was that don't seem to grok the techno-philosophical advancements
                                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I think you mean "tools". I understand that you want to say they are 
separate from technical advanacements only.