thedwick

I’ve always said that someone who considers themself a senior developer should be comfortable picking up any language to get a project done. Lately, though, I’ve been doing so much development in Java that I’ve started feeling like a “java developer”.

So it was refreshing to see a rant from Steve Yeggee about functional programming and verb-centric development as opposed to the noun-centric development commonly found in strongly typed, OO languages like Java.

I’ve read lots of rants about the superiority of functional programming, but most of them tend to be way to smug to have any hope of converting anyone. This one is smug, too, but smug in a different way. And not short on useful examples.

Anyway, what’s the advice out of that? Make sure you keep up on articles that fall outside your immediate domain or you’ll get stuck in a rut, approaching problems only one way.

Just tonight, I sent an email to my own wife (who was in the next room) through a web site (LinkedIn) to ask for the email address of a friend of ours. At first, that sounds like the beginning of a joke you might find in the New Yorker making fun of our tendency to make life too techno-complicated. But if you knew the background you might really begin to smell the revolution arriving…

…the back story is that I was using the first 10 minutes I’d had free during the day to check email. My wife was in the other room rinsing out some soiled underwear (it’s potty training time) and trying to wrangle my half-naked son. As soon as she was done with that, I got rolled into some other childcare ruckus. In any case, the first chance the two of us got to talk to each other without distractions wasn’t till a couple of hours later and the last thing I want to squander that time on is asking about someone’s email address. She probably won’t see my request until tomorrow, and to answer the question all she’ll have to do is click a link in LinkedIn (which already knows our friend’s email address) and shoot the response automatically back to me. In total, we’d both probably spend 60 seconds of our own time to get the job done, but that 60 seconds would be spread across two days.

What’s the magic then? Taking 2 days to do 60 seconds worth of work?

Certainly not. The magic is:
Email is asynchronous. This means we both have the luxury of doing low-value activities (finding email addresses) during low-value time (goofing off at work) and doing high-value activities (bonding with each other) during the high-value times (when we’re both free and together at the same time).

Ten years ago, you couldn’t have done that. At least not as easily.