A linux defeat

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Converting to a culture

You've talked about this issue before, but I see it from a slightly different perspective, because of my study of Smalltalk. I've discussed Smalltalk with other people, and seen them reject it because it's too different. What I eventually realized was most of the people who had tried using it, even for an extensive period of time, misunderstood it. They mistook it for a programming language and a VM, like Java. For some weird reason it ran its own GUI and insisted that programmers use its developer tools. What they missed was that Smalltalk in its typical implementation is practically its own operating system. Seen from this context, it begins to make sense. Even this description does not encompass what it really is. To understand what it truly is requires a cultural shift in thinking. It's not enough to just learn the language, and only think of it as a language, because the rest of the system will confuse and frustrate you. It's not enough to understand that the language is object-oriented (If you get into it, you come to understand that it's really message-oriented).

Making this cultural shift is really like leaving your home country and going to live in a foreign country, and being steeped in its culture and language for a while. Most people don't want to make that shift. It's too much effort. It can make one feel stupid, too, because the rules have changed. The place feels and looks unfamiliar. As I'm sure you're aware, the only real way for a company to make that cultural shift in the IT department is to retrain or replace the staff.

In life, cultural shifts are hard to do, because they require a reorientation of the way you think. It's not merely a new language. It's a new way of being. I don't know if technology cultures require this level of change, but they certainly require that you understand their way of thinking to truly understand them.

Incentives can help though. One of the things Smalltalkers have noticed as RoR has become more popular is that more people are finding out about Smalltalk, because Ruby borrows some things from it. The reason people have flocked to Ruby is because of the instant gratification that Rails gives you. Some stay for the beauty of the language as well. They celebrate the fact that in some ways it makes their work life much easier. So they're willing to make that cultural shift because they make an immediate visceral realization that it's beneficial to them.

One of the problems Smalltalk has had is it doesn't offer this immediate gratification. If people see demos of Seaside (a web framework for it) they may be wowed, but it's not the same thing. Perhaps Linux in its current form doesn't immediately grab people, making them excited about it, and wanting to learn about it further. What might be a more successful model is a Linux-like system that appeals to Windows administrators, that gives them greater ease of operation, some modes of operation that are familiar, while also keeping many properties of the Linux way of doing things. This is the strategy Rails uses. It offers some familiar modes of operation, while at the same time being very different at the language level.

I say this because a lot of the people who have moved over to Ruby are former Java developers. It was able to grab their interest because they could understand its benefits without completely understanding its culture first. This is just speculating, but maybe the reason for this is Rails actually has a good marketer behind it, DHH. He understood who his target audience of programmers was, and designed Rails with them in mind. Perhaps the secret to Linux success is understanding the mind of Windows administrators and what they want, without completely sacrificing what Linux is.

Posted by: Mark Miller   Posted on: 10/11/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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