Leveraging Mindshare
For quite some time, a good friend of mine has been pestering me to learn the computer language known as haskell. He goes on and on about the virtues of functional programming, and the various nifty things the type system will allow. He thoroughly enjoys using it and, enticed by his enthusiasm, I figured I’d give it a shot. After three weeks, I was as lost as ever. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent human being. I have been writing software for more than ten years, and thought I knew what I was doing. But trying to learn haskell on my own, with only the web, and a few tips from my friend left me really scratching my head. I sort of understand the concepts that the various tutorials are trying to teach, but the syntax of the language is so different that I just can’t seem to see the relation to anything familiar. Upon discussing this with my friend, he disclosed that it took him the better part of a decade to really master haskell, though he could have done it in far less time had he been using it full time. Well, that may be my problem too. Poking at the language for an hour here, and two hours there just isn’t enough for me to really grasp the relationship between haskell and the various software engineering concepts that I’ve used in the course of my professional life. Until then, all the power and beauty of haskell will remain closed to me.
Another experience I had was when our company was looking to get off of cvs as our version control system. Someone decided that TLA, an implementation of the debian arch VCS system, would make a good replacement. It provided all the theoretical solutions to our problems with cvs. Sure the interface was a bit raw, but we could work around that, right? Our needs are interesting. We have several hundred projects, all of which are written by someone else. Most of these projects need to have patches applied, and we need a system to maintain which patches go with which versions of which projects. In cvs land, it was a branch/merge nightmare. In TLA, it was less so. However there are a few projects we have that are written and maintained by us, one of which is my project. I have a small team of three senior engineers. Trying to get us all using TLA instead of cvs was about twice as painful as a trip to the dentist on the day after he ran our of NOX. The base concepts may have been the same, but the entire interface abandoned anything remotely akin to cvs. In fact, this was a deliberate decision by the developers of TLA. They wanted a full fresh start, and threw away all convention. Once again, until we could redesign our development process, the beauty of TLA was closed to us. We just couldn’t apply our old processes to the new system.
Both of these experiences highlighted something very important for me. No matter how cool or revolutionary something is, if a person can’t leverage their existing experiences and skills in using it, then that item is closed to them. It remains useless until such time as they can understand it. Several cases exist where leveraging has occurred. Email, c#, java, cell phones, and countless others. Now this isn’t to say that a revolutionary thing is useless, but it will fail to gain mass adoption if it requires someone to abandon all or most of their previous concepts and start from scratch. Given that, it is important to put yourself in the users mind when looking at something new that you’ve created. Does it have some familiar concept that will allow the user to grasp what it is that you’re doing, or will it appear completely foreign? Mindshare is a valuable thing. It is how we stand on the shoulders of giants. Starting over is expensive.