setTimeout(WAY_LATE,WakeyWakeyDave)
December 20th, 2006Via Simon Willison, I see that Dave Winer demonstrates how remarkably far out of touch he is with the state of internet programming.
JSON has been promoted for a couple of years now, and has been visibly gaining traction among the net programming community for at least 18 months. It’s quite telling that it has only recently filtered through Dave’s navel-focused gaze.
And before any analysis, he’s quick to dismiss and belittle it:
God bless the re-inventers
Gotta love em, because there’s no way they’re going to stop breaking what works, and fixing what don’t need no fixing.
…and to show us the particular shade of his sunglasses:
I figured, sheez it can’t be that hard to parse, so let’s see what it looks like, and damn, IT’S NOT EVEN XML!
As Dr Phil asks — What were they thinking?
Sheez, Dave, maybe they were thinking “I don’t care to use XML” – those presumptuous philistines. Let the XML infidels be slaughtered:
Who did this travesty? Let’s find a tree and string them up. Now.
Chief infidel Douglas Crockford’s comment is worth framing:
I liked the part where Dr Phil said “What were they thinking?†I asked the same question when I first saw XML being proposed as a data format. There were obviously better alternatives.
The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.
Dave leaves the best line for last:
Silicon Valley is made up of little boys pulling their puds, constantly making love to each other, pretending the world revolves around them.
…the all-too-easy inference of course being that it actually revolves around Dave Winer, chief pud-puller, making love only to himself.
JSON is such an great format for structuring data compared to XML. Shame more people don’t use/know about it. It’s way easier to construct/parse and browsers can natively evaluate it. In my latest C++ project, I’m using JSON for the config files. Life is sweet.
I dropped Dave from my reading list long ago. I think he went crazy in the echo-chamber. I theorise that edge-case (super-frequent) bloggers get absorbed by the ‘reality’ of the discussion they draw around them. The polarity brings them to a point where extremism in the form of absolutism seems normal.
I think the following quote covers this latest Winerism :
“There are plenty of hard problems that need attention. Spending energy trying to denigrate or eliminate viable tools is pointless.”
http://www.addsimplicity.com/adding_simplicity_an_engi/2006/12/its_a_tool_not_.html
It’s unfortunate the otherwise very smart people (Winer) get so self-absorbed that they lose focus and innovation and degrade to the level of pompous criticism of everything around them. Winer needs to go back and find the SOAP he left in the shower.