|
|
|
|
|
|
by jay-aye-see-key
876 days ago
|
|
|
I’ve always really disliked the sharp knives metaphor. A chef’s choice of knife doesn’t impact their coworkers, nor does it end up on the plate to a customer. If we were chefs a knife would be your laptop, your editor, your cli tools. Not your programming language. A better metaphor would be the lumber in a building or the soil in a garden. I don’t know what I’d call ruby in this metaphor, maybe “lightweight wood that splinters”… |
|
|
That being said, the original "Sharp Knives" piece is talking about powerful language features and whether to ban them in your kitchen, so yes, it has plenty of effect on their coworkers. Because it's a shared decision to not ban sharp knives from the kitchen, but trust and educate, and realize that people who're doing harmful things can do so with dull knives too. It's about the techniques you allow in your codebase, it doesn't propose that ruby is one "knife".
And programming language features does not, generally, end up on the plate of the customer either. The fact that this site is written in a language that allows even more powerful meta programming than ruby is not bleeding through in the sense that we now have the tools of the language available to us. We haven't been served sharp knives. We've been served the consequences of the engineering that went into it, and the people doing that engineering had the opportunity to leverage or ignore the sharp knives of the language. That language being lisp, I'm pretty sure they had at it.