Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Brian Marick is my hero
Today I saw a post by Brian Marick, the author of Exploration Through Example. This post was about multiline strings in Ruby.
Just a small tiny thing you might think. Why can't he just accept multilines as they are and align his text to the left border of the screen. Why does he bother making up strange formatting conventions that tell to the code where the actual beginning of the line is? Why, for heaven sake, does he waste precious memory cycles?
Brian Marick is my new hero. Because he thinks about these details and because he does care about them. In his blog he talks mainly about testing and how to do testing by example, but what I really care about is his underlying philosophy, which it seems to me to be very much people oriented and language oriented.
He seems to care about aestethics, perception, expressiveness, mental models and human factors of coding. He cares for what, in my circle, I like to call "Software Ergonomics" and "Language Development".
He also care about what I call "Knowledge Ecology". I started blogging because I have been reading the blogs of people like Brian and I felt like contributing with my own experiences.
I don't know if you are reading this Brian, but I really dig your style. Kudos to you and please keep up with the excelent work.
