I read it as simply a rather blatant advert for akka.
:)Įveryone wanted to be in Cloud, now too much people chant "let's be reactive". Paul - That is a great quote, but no I wasn't intentionally referencing it. Let's not make what we don't know into a religion, for God's sake."
".we don't know how to design systems yet. Is your last sentence a deliberate reference to Kay? ) Interested in solving hard problems? Does designing and building massively scaling, event-driven systems get you excited? Do you believe in the reactive manifesto? Let’s talk. We checked out your projects on GitHub and we are really impressed with your Scala skills. Update: I recently received a note from a recruiter, which contained the following gem: But let's not make it a manifesto, please! I would welcome some interesting precise claims and arguments (that aren't inane truisms) about how to build robust large systems (there may even be the seeds of some nuggets of truth somewhere in the reactive manifesto). Well, I don't want to join such a movement, and the pop culture and tribalism of our industry is something I'd like to see go away. In the reactive manifesto, one is invited to join a movement and rally around a banner of buzzwords and a participatory, communal cloud of vagueness.
So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. No, the reactive manifesto is a piece of pop culture, which I mean in the sense used by Alan Kay:Ĭomputing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. Imagine the ridiculousness of creating to rally people around O(n*log n) sorting algorithms as opposed to O(n^2) algorithms.
Technical arguments don't need manifestos or rallying cries. Do we really need a manifesto to tell us these things? Of course not.īut the point of the reactive manifesto is not to make precise technical claims. When you cut through the bullshit, it seems the only actual information content are inane or tautological statements like "being resillient to failure is good" and "one shouldn't waste OS threads by blocking". Its arguments hold up only by being not even wrong.
I could try to interpret and respond to some of the vague claims that seem wrong or silly (for instance, I detect some confusion between an asynchronous API and an asynchronous implementation), but then I fully expect defenders to define away the criticism or say I've misinterpreted things. On a technical level, though, the reactive manifesto is too vague to critique. Let’s experiment with this thinking.I am sure the authors and signers of the reactive manifesto are well-meaning people, but the entire tone and concept of the site is just wrong. I welcome the stretches on both extremes: from ‘not even wrong’ to ‘out of this world’. ‘Remarkable’ does it for me with my team we are in the business of building remarkable organizations.īusiness language does not like hyperboles but we need some of them to deal with the rather dull business idiom. Imagine the categories ‘beyond brilliant’, ‘incredibly awesome’ or ‘astoundingly exceptional’. The other extreme would also be fantastic. Clarity, honesty, candour are qualities in short supply in our day to day management. It would be healthy to be able to say that some hypotheses about human behaviour, or assumptions about employee engagement, or an approach to leadership, are ‘not even wrong’. And ‘not even wrong’ means it’s not even worth saying how bad it is. His impatience gave us the freedom to call something that is truly bad, not even wrong.
Somehow, good to bad was just too small a distance for Pauli. I suppose at the other extreme, there is the ‘beyond extraordinarily good’. It’s not bad thinking, its not even wrong! I love the concept and I love the extension of the spectrum, good to bad. Consistently attributed to physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who had no time for sloppy thinking, ‘not even wrong’ has become a category in its own right.