Wisdom and Wonder

From Wikipedia:

A meme consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

Whether or not you agree in the validity of memes as a science (I don’t); the term is often used in pop culture, generally representing some bit information, usually in the form of a frequently repeated phrase, that spreads around and around the community. In the programming community, there are plenty. For example, here are a few: “convention over configuration”, “don’t write code just to make the compiler happy”, or “every developer must learn how to program concurrently or the world will end”.

The interesting things about memes is that they often have an element of truth behind them. For example:

• “Convention over configuration”: Abstract away often repeated work
• “Don’t write code just to make the compiler happy”: Use the right language for the task at hand
• “Every developer must learn how to program concurrently or the world will end”: Use the right language for the task at hand
• “[My programming language] is purely functional“: For the type of program I am writing, side-effects are not welcome

The idea of memes is to pass around the interesting idea so that we can all benefit from it. The problem with them, though, is that they don’t pass around the interesting idea so that we can all benefit from them. Instead, they sort of pass around a half-truth whose only intention is to further, most probably, some individuals agenda. For example:

• Lisp is convention or configuration taken to the extreme, but you never hear anyone saying that (If you hear me saying it, slap me), and they shouldn’t. Ruby on Rails is to Ruby as Struts was to Java; the only and therefore best of its time.
• “Don’t write code just to make the compiler happy” has got to be one the silliest things I’ve ever heard. Use a statically typed language for a reason. Use dynamically typed language for a reason. If can’t figure out the difference than you will always be a slave.
• The IEEE, ACM, and nearly every presenter at JavaOne 08 preached fear of the multicore future without expounding on why every developer needs to master multi-core programming (solution looking for a problem?). That said, if every programmer learned how to program really well in the first place, we might not need 64 cores.
• “Haskell is purely functional, so it is better than all other impure languages”: Please help me, the reader, understand why!

Because memes are half-truths, people often don’t get to the meaty goodness of the truths behind them, though, at some gut-level they know there is a very good truth hiding back there. If, like most people, they don’t explore it further, they associate the meaty truthful goodness with the ugly, half-truth of the meme. Therein lies the danger of memes, whenever the meme comes up the individual sort of experiences the behavior modification reaction much like a Skinner pigeon.

Sprinkle any article or blog post or discussion with any number of such memes and you have instant gold for making your point unbeatable. It is a strange and disappointing phenomenon that draws into question much of what is written in the tech world today.