Why is Perl so successful, despite its obvious flaws? Danah Boyd:
“Coolness” is about structural barriers, about the lack of universal accessibility or parsability. Structural hurdles mean people put in more effort to participate. It’s kinda like the adventure of tracking down the right parking lot to get the bus to go to the rave. The effort matters. Sure, it weeds some people out, but it makes those who participate feel all the more validated. Finding the easter egg, the cool little feature that no one knows about is exciting. Learning all of the nooks and crannies in a complex system is exhilarating. Figuring out how to hack things, having the “inside knowledge” is fabu.
Often, people don’t need simplicity – they want to feel proud of themselves for figuring something out; they want to feel the joy of exploration.
Bugs make technologies seem alive, particularly if they’re acknowledged and fixed. They give texture to the environment and people are impressively patient with it if they feel like the architects are on it. It makes the architects look vulnerable which brings them back down to earth, making them real and fallible, but giving them the opportunity to do good. They let the benevolent dictator really serve the people.
Well, the quote isn’t actually about Perl. It’s about social community sites like Friendster and MySpace, and why teenage kids prefer MySpace’s bugs, ugliness and idiosyncracies over the Friendster’s streamlined simplicity and uniformity.
But I find it revealing. It’s the same with technologies. Being inaccessible can be cool, it’s a way of distancing yourself from people who are “not in the know.”
Just like parents who don’t comprehend what their kids are doing on MySpace and become afraid of sexual predators and cry for the lawmaker, the Java and C# and PHP developers can’t comprehend why the Perl disciples put up with all that apparent insanity around their language of choice. Now we know: It’s their way of rebelling against their colleagues.
It’s not just Perl: Perl is certainly an extreme example of this technology subculturalism, and making fun of the whale gut wranglers is cheap and easy. But are the rest of us any better?
I’m certainly not. After all, would I still be involved with RDF and the Semantic Web if it wasn’t for all those fine people at #swig, Planet RDF, the SemDesk workshops, and jena-dev? Would I have bought a PowerBook if all the alpha geeks hadn’t switched a year or two earlier? I look down on folks who don’t use a real text editor. And I certainly enjoy my Web 2.0 group therapy. I often advise newbies on open source mailing lists to “just get the latest code from CVS and compile” – knowing full well that this will be a major struggle for them. But it’s a rite of passage: You just can’t be part of the software developer tribe if you haven’t compiled a project from CVS.
Why do technologies get adopted or fail? If a technology gets widely adopted or falls by the wayside is not a function of its quality alone, we all know that. Sometimes it can seem as if quality doesn’t matter at all. The IBM PC triumphed over the Mac, Windows triumphed over OS/2, VHS over Betamax, C++ over Objective-C, Smalltalk over Java, PHP over Python, the list is endless. Many explanations have been offered. Worse is better – correctness, consistency and completeness can be sacrificed for simplicity, said Richard Gabriel. It’s all about marketing – using dollars or individual genius – said Steve Yegge. It’s about hitting the 80/20 point, said Tim Bray. I humbly submit: It’s also about being cool, being different, belonging to a tribe, expressing yourself.
Returning to Danah Boyd’s Friendster/MySpace essay: If you want your technology – be it a language, a commercial web site, an open source project, a standard – to succeed, then part of your job is to create an environment where your users and customers have the space to bond into a tribe, express themselves, be different and develop and share their cultural values. Because we all are rebellious teenage kids at heart.
(If you don’t follow the social software space and have no idea what Friendster and Orkut and LinkedIn and MySpace are about, then go read the essay. The socio-technological revolution of my generation was the Web. The next generation’s revolution will be the thing whose early incarnations you can see today at those sites. And you can watch it brewing in Danah’s writing.)