I guess I'll hang out my tears to dry

There seems to be a roaring discussion about a talk by Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin at this years RailsConf, which mainly seems to be concerned with the question (raised by a quote appointed to Ward Cunningham) whether languages such as Smalltalk make it too easy to create a mess. Languages such as C++ would penalize the mess at least by longer compile times.

As Giles points out that's an old argument, which I too have heard too often in the past about dynamic languages, regardless whether we're talking Smalltalk, Ruby, Lisp, Python or Perl. And the anti-dote was always the current idiot language of the date, i.e. Visual Basic at its high time, Java or C# (for those who considered C or C++ to be too dangerous). Please note that I'm not at all saying that users of those languages are idiots, but those languages are particularly claimed to be usable by idiots, too. This approach to languages or to their classification does a great job of misrepresenting programmers regardless of the language of their choice. It makes the bold claim that there are programmers that are idiots and that it's possible to design a language that even those idiots can do their jobs. And the exaggeration is that its only good business sense to enforce the use of those languages for all development projects, because, as we all know, there are more idiots than intelligent programmers out there, right?

The only problem with this claim is that human stupidity is probably the only thing larger than the universe, if you make something idiot proof, nature will quickly make a better idiot. To put it a little less cynical, to err is human. And there is value in people making mistakes. As for instance, Tom DeMarco claims in his book "Slack" it's a particular good way to learn. Bob Martin tries to sell excessive testing (which isn't particular surprising, giving his background) as one safety guard to which James Robertson responds that this is not always necessary:

Yes, tests are useful. But, the debugger is not something to be feared. Rather, it's a great tool to be used in order to have the computer do all the memory work for you. I can get a lot more done by working with decent tools like the Smalltalk debugger than I can by assuming the doc is good and writing tests that just help me a whole lot less than you might think.

I can relate to this quote, being a fan of interactive development that languages like Lisp or Smalltalk made popular. But I think James is missing the point: tests are not only helpful during development. Sure, using an interactive approach helps getting the code run but does it help to come up with a clean design? Looking back at some code, I can assure you it doesn't, quite to the contrary it's a way to get a working solution quickly, not cleanly. This doesn't make the debugger or the REPL less valuable: using it you can quickly establish your tests, debug your tests, whatever. This is exactly where the value of dynamic languages shines and those "silver-bullet" idiot languages are still behind, regardless of their shiny IDEs.

But the real point summing up the discussion so far is the old Frederick Brooks quote: There is no silver bullet. It's good to be careful and to use the tools at your hands to help you avoid the big mistakes. As Paul Graham puts it for OOP: "For programs that would have ended up as spaghetti anyway, the object-oriented model is good: they will at least be structured spaghetti." But in the end you have to learn how to avoid the mess in the first place and no language and no tool can do that for you.

ObTitle: Dexter Gordon, "Ballads"