TITLE: Greatness, Skill, and Metaprogramming
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 14, 2010  9:15 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
It's been a long week teaching and doing end-of-year
reports for the department, not to mention
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-05.html#e2010-05-12T07_41_34.htm">
   putting out daily fires</A>.
I have a few things to say about the agile development
course at the 1/4 mark, but another day.

While writing reports this evening, I listened to
several talks and interviews.  One was
<A HREF="http://mtnwestrubyconf2008.confreaks.com/03bowkett.html">
   Giles Bowkett's talk on meta-programming</A>
at the 2008 Mountain West Ruby Conference.  Actually,
Bowkett objects to the the idea of meta-programming,
as
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-11.html#e2009-11-02T18_59_40.htm">
   I discussed a few months ago</A>.
At one level, I agree with him; it's all just programming.
In this talk, he elaborates on this position and does
a little just-programming in Ruby to generate code.

The part of this talk that stood out for me this evening
was the part of his conclusion in which he discusses
Paul Graham's recent work.  Bowkett summarizes most of
Graham's writing about Lisp, programming, and
meta-programming as:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Great programmers can write better programmers than
they can hire.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

He disagrees with this sentiment in only one word:
'great'.  After comically mocking an undue focus on
greatness that he attributes to most Harvard grads,
he explains that he prefers the more straightforward
'skilled':  <EM>Skilled programmers</EM> can write
better programmers than they can hire.

I prefer 'skilled' to 'great' too, because 'great'
intimidates too many people.  They think other
people are or can be great, but that they themselves
can be merely ordinary.  Maybe so, but ordinary
programmers can improve their skills and learn new
things.  Most ordinary programmers can become skilled
programmers, even in the dark art of metaprogramming.
They, too, can learn to write better programmers
than they can hire, or be.

Of course, this implies that we can help most of the
programmers we want to hire be better programmers,
by helping them to develop the skills that they need
to be good.

If you watch the talk, watch out for a his egregious
botching of Lisp syntax in the course of demeaning
all those evil parentheses that Lisp foists on us.
I would tell him the same thing I tell my students:
the parentheses aren't nearly as bad -- or as
numerous -- once you learn how to use them properly!
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