Blockstackers Dyspeptic
So there’s this interview with Alan Kay, an old-school Apple guy and frequent denigrator of today’s computers. Jes was talking the other day about how Kay’s metaphor of contemporary apps being like the pyramids - brute-force stacks of blocks made possible only by large numbers of Egyptian slaves - was so depressing for an ambitious coder. What we need is not more pyramids, but cathedrals. But no one has discovered the arch yet.
When the architects of Everything2 attempted to productize their core code (along with some other stuff), they named their company Blockstackers Intergalactic. In the best case, programming feels pretty much just like that: stacking blocks, like a happy or at least distracted kid sitting on a shag rug in the middle of the family room. In the worst cases, it feels a little more like being a slave in Egypt. Big fucking blocks, those were.
So that was on my mind when I concluded my post yesterday. I think I’ve been slacking off on 0.2 milestones because what’s left to do - adding a feature to the admin pages, then adding another one, et cetera - feels very much like mindlessly putting one thing on top of another. Many of the distractions I’ve been employing lately have actually been themed around (hopefully) eliminating some of this kind of busywork. Funny enough, not long ago I linked to one of them - Ruby on Rails, a web framework that promises, and seems to deliver, dramatically faster development of database-backed web apps - as a joke about the other context of “on rails:” that of being bored and having nothing to do but mindlessly move forward. I am hoping that RoR promises the opposite, but there’s no time to waste exploring it now.
Must. Stack. Blocks.
February 17th, 2005