Leaving the Cult of Personality

Or how I learned to love (and use) my opinion

Programmers are opinionated. “This is dumb, I can do it better” is something I have thought (and I hope, done) many times.

And I’m not alone. Many of the upper echelon of the programming world have reputations for being equal-parts brilliant, opinionated, and often abrasive. The patron saint of Linux, Linus Torvalds, is notoriously cranky. He can get quite worked up. Here is a fun one:

“Guys, this is not a dick-sucking contest.

If you want to parse PE binaries, go right ahead. If Red Hat wants to deep-throat Microsoft, that’s *your* issue. That has nothing what-so-ever to do with the kernel I maintain.”

But Linus is only one of a junta of tech royalty. Rails has it’s overlord, DHH. JQuery has John Resig. Node, Ryan Dahl. Even Java, with it’s storied history, has its own godfather, James Gosling. These guys are the public faces of their creations, and rightly so: they have created amazing tools that have helped to create some of the biggest companies in the world. They are inspiring.

The other side of the coin however,is that the programmer figurehead can and does lead to bad behavior among some large percentage of the remaining programmers. Perhaps bad is a little strong. Lazy might be more accurate.

When a single person (or cadre of trusted people) has had outsized influence in the evolution of these tools, it is very easy to put your faith in them. I find myself hearing stuff like this fairly often:

“Oh, DHH wrote Rails, obviously he knows the best way to move forward in Rails 4.”

That kind of argument, for me, is just intellectually lazy, and is a byproduct of this cult of personality. Much like the times, browser capabilities, computing power, hardware, and tons of other technological indicators are constantly, inexorably evolving. This evolution, by its nature, creates new ideas and opinions. Those ideas may not be in the head of John or David or Ryan or James. They may be in yours.

If so, use your opinion. After all, you probably exercise it in almost every other aspect of your life. Ask yourself: is this the best way to accomplish this? Could you do it better? What is everyone else missing? Maybe try to implement some improvement (or a whole new method of doing the task). Your curiosity craves it, and your opinion demands it. Succeed or fail, there is much to be learned. Remember, these tools were originally created by opinionated people who explicitly did not trust the direction of current existing solutions, people just like you.