Dominiek.com

I’ve just finished this book: The Search. This book by John Battelle is about the search industry. All of us in the western cyberspace know the great success of Google. According to Battelle (not to confuse with the Battelle organization) the success of Google is a result of some big changes in the Information Age. The Web is growing more and more towards a collective organism, creating petabytes of data. Battelle talks about therecent ‘Force of the Many’, which I also observed in my paper on Web 2.0, creating an emphasis on the communication and data/content of web applications. Google’s main business is redirecting users (demand) to the right information (supply), making advertising on Google one of the most effective ones.

All this information creates a lot of search problems, which have been solved for only 5% now. This means that there are still a lot of technology and business oppurtunities out there. One of the oppurtunities on the web is gathering data and combining it with other data. A nice example of this can be found in the recent ‘Mashup’ phenomenon. Mashups are about combining data (sometimes through scraping/crawling it) and creating a new service with it.

Battelle’s book handles search from both a micro and a macro perspective, respectively these are Google as a company and one of these cool quotes:

All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected. But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships. A timeless interval was spent in doing that. And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy. -‘The Last Question’ by Isaac Asimov

Some of Battelle’s statements can be quite speculative and even philosophical, but they’re interesting to say the least.

I’ve found some interesting similarities with another book I’m reading ‘The 8th Habit’ by Stephen Covey. This self-help book appears totally unrelated, untill you read chapter 2, ‘The Problem’. Covey states that there are five ages in the human cultural evolution:

In each transition to the next age it is very important to adapt to new ways of thinking. For example, farmers that adapted Industrial Age thinking survived and became much more productive. In our current Knowledge/Information Age we miss out on a lot of productivity because of Industrial Age thinking (thing mind-set). A top software developer can be 1000 to 10000 times more productive then average software developers.

As you can see in the above illustration, Covey suggests the 5th age to be the ‘Wisdom Age’. Covey doesn’t give any further information about it other then: ‘and finally, an emerging Age of Wisdom’. I’m really puzzled about this ‘Age of Wisdom’ and it’s relation to a web that indeed already holds all knowledge. Is the ‘Age of Wisdom’ the means to access this knowledge, the ability to learn learning?

There are many different programming languages out there. Each of them have profound cultural implications to their programmers. Programmers that learn new languages every once in a while find themselves travelling through different geek-culture warzones. Since one year I settled down in Ruby land. For me this language is unique, unlike any other language I have ever seen. One could view Ruby as the mechanical version of a natural language, because it allows people to extend this computer language like a natural language.

Python and Ruby programmer’s mostly oppose eachother, although they can agree on one thing: PHP is the devil. Python and Ruby branched from the same ancestral tree but have significant cultural impacts. Like Java, Python embraces the principle of uniformity, whereas Ruby embraces the principle of diversity. One could argue that the latter might be more suitable for most of the current (european) political models :)

Now, I’m not saying that Python is for communists. Actually, I’d rather not dirty my hands on politics. But I do think these principles have significant cultural and economical consequences, respectively these are the working environment and the productivity.

I’m highly convinced that Ruby has a much greater potential for both. Programmers can program in their own style, they can even look at it as art. Like a columnist loves writing articles, programmers love writing their kung-fu code. I wonder wether this same columnist can have the same artistic joy in China.

David Heinemeier Hansson, the inventor of RubyOnRails, says beauty leads to happiness, hapiness leads to productivity . I do agree that the programmer’s freedom in creating this hapiness contributes to the productivity, but I don’t think it’s enough. To achieve the full potential of Ruby’s productivity, we need to adjust our development methodologies to this awesome language. Rails makes a good start by facilitating for example unit testing.

In short, I think Ruby is THE language for the new software world and a gateway to new ways of thinking.