Coders are herd animals - FunFunFunction #18

Key Takeaways

good Monday morning I'm mpj and this is fun fun function so today I have a cold my head feels twice the size it normally is today I want to talk about the programmer in the context of humans being herd animals and if you think that yeah I'm not a herd animal that's just other people then you are probably the worst herd animal of all because this affects everyone because it's built into the backbone of our brains first we're going to talk about what is a herd animal what's the definition of a herd animal and what are the cognitive biases that we have that we need to be aware of secondly what are the benefits of being a herd animal what are the benefits of a huge amount of programmers all doing the same thing and then of course what are the downsides of being a herd animal when does this go wrong for us as programmers and finally we're going to talk about when it is appropriate to break from the herd and when it's not a thing that I tend to repeat on this channel a lot is that there is no best tool and the reason I repeat that a lot is that people ask me that a lot what is the best tool there is no such thing as a universal good you need to have some kind of context some sort of criteria in order to judge the thing against this is actually true in general not just programming there is actually a great book on the subject uh called sen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I uh I don't seem to have it in my bookshelf but trust me it's amazing you should read it either way I don't think that most people need to read a book in order to figure out that in order to know what the best tool is you first need to understand what your problem is and then and only then evaluate tools to figure fig out which tool is the best fit for your problem but even though most people know this deep inside they keep asking I know that I do whenever I start learning a new area of development I start intuitively to look for the recommended way of doing things I I'm I'm searching for Best Practices to do this best practices so why do we why do we do that all the time and my theory is that we do it because we are herd animals so what is a herd animal I'm going to look up the definition on Wikipedia the group tends to act together for example all moving in the same direction at a given time but that this does not occur as a result of planning or coordination rather each individual is choosing behavior that corresponds to that of the majority of the others members possibly through imitation or possibly because all are responding to the same external circumstance this behavior is well documented in humans and it is called social default bias if you want to read up on social default bias I've linked a great article in the description but the tldr is whenever we can't make informed decisions we copy others so are there any benefits to this I mean it's obvious that it's beneficial for a uh heard of animals escaping a lion but is it a useful behavior for programmers as well I would say yes absolutely I would say that PHP is probably the best example of it PHP is a language with a few flaws but the fact that so many people use it makes everybody very aware of the floors and uh creates tooling and documentation and all around help in in order to compensate for that when many many people use the same tool it allows us to create this big ecosystem around it and that ecosystem is often way more valuable than the core technology itself some communities or herds are also very good at finding a single way of doing things the python Community is really good at that uh and the c community too there is one way of naming private variables there is one way of inden there's one way of inheriting it's it's pretty calming it's pretty comfortable the JavaScript bir does not quite have that cohesion so if you are used to something like python you're going to be very frustrated when you when you start learning JavaScript and you wonder how do I do inheritance and uh a person ask well that depends on what kind of person you are but what are downsides of being a herd the problem is that you kind of risk stagnation it's a bit annoying when a herd is unstable like the JavaScript Community is on some point but it is way worse when a herd is too stable it makes it really easy to get into the herd because all the rules are very clear but it also makes it really hard to change the herd and if you become too unresponsive to change you might miss out on a lot of good change for example like washing your hands around the year 1846 there was this guy called semil wise he was the person that first figured out that washing your hands uh stops disease from spreading at that point they didn't know what bacteria was but he figured out with clear statistical significance evidence of and everything that if you have your doctors wash your wash their hands in a hospital uh a lot less people die after this was discovered proven and documented uh it took about 80 years before doctors started washing their hands as a common practice when people have a habit especially in a group it's really hard to change that but that's doctors that's medicine that's a that's slow us programmers we're agile we don't do that right well I would say yes we do I know that I certainly do I would say that the web development evidence in question is jsx I remember clearly when I saw jsx for the first time I hated jsx it's not like I started using it and then hated it no I started hating it from the second I saw it and the reason I hated it was that it mixed JavaScript and HTML in one file and that was clearly against the beliefs of us as web developers so after a while quite a while we the web developers and me with them uh started to learn that just because we want to do separation of concerns doesn't mean that we need to do uh separation of Technologies and we learned that JS Su that's that's pretty awesome so there is upsides and downsides to being a herd then the question arises when do we break with the herd when do we go in a New Direction and uh when do we not what's important to realize is that there will always be a better tool available than the one the herd is using Always Somewhere someone has written a better tool but earlier we talked about how the herd Builds an ecosystem it builds documentation it builds tools and that ecosystem has tremendous value so in order for a switch to something new to make sense this new thing has to be a lot better not just a little better A lot better because we will be throwing away a lot of this ecosystem in order to make the switch and this is why a dart fail Dart is a clear Improvement upon JavaScript I think you can safely say that it is objectively better but it's not like it's 10 times better and that is just not better enough an example of something that is better enough is git git is amazingly good compared to its predecessor sub version G completely rethinks How We Do Version Control it's such a big difference that I would I would personally not not want to work for a company that you subversion over git the difference is so huge throwing away the subversion ecosystem made a lot of sense because git offered so much more value in the case of Dart not so much so today we have explored the programmer as a herd animal we have thought a bit about what a herd animal is what the upsides are of being a herd animal what the downsides are and when it is a good idea to break from the herd and when to take the herd in a New Direction I am mpj this is fun fun function until next Monday morning stay curious