Podcast 059
Intro: Up next on episode 59 of StackOverflow Joel and Jeff sit down with Damien Katz to discuss unconventional databases, unconventional programming languages and taking on unconventional programming projects.
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Atwood: Should we introduce our guest, Damien Katz...
Spolsky: I think we should.
Atwood: ...of CouchDB fame?
Katz: Helo?
Atwood: Yeah (Laughs).
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Atwood: So thanks for agreeing to be on the show and we should give a little bit of a background about Damien. And actually one of the reasons... I've known Damian, well known is a very loose term, but I sort of discovered his blog like a long time ago, gosh, like a 2005. When did you start your big advanture [incomplete]? What was the timeline for that?
Katz: I think it was around 2005. I think it was 2004 when we decided. I think it was 2005 when we actually moved to Charllete.
Atwood: Yeah. So I [incomplete] nearly the beginning of your journey. And at first, let me tell you, I was really angry with you. Because this was... At the time I was reading your blog I was in a job where I had to work with Lotus Notes every day because it was email system. So I found as, oh yeah, I found this developer, I hate this guy, I hate this guy. He worked on Lotus Notes. [incomplete]. But then I felt bad because you actually are a nice guy and kind of interesting blogger so I grew to love you. I think it's what happened.
Katz: I get that a lot about, you know, people with their dislike of Lotus Notes so... I'm always kind of nervous, you know, about that...say...well you know it's... Well I don't want to dump on it because I work hard on it and a lot of people work really hard on it and it is the way it is for a reason but else we know it's also in kind of a big bloated mess and I understand your frustrations.
Spolsky: I'm gonna go out on a limb and say Lotus Notes rocked for its era and if the reason people hated it, is because they were forced to [incomplete] things that they couldn't do because they were sold at the enterprise level with all kinds of, you know, Lotus sells people.
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Katz: When we switched over to JavaScript, it was just out of a practical matter, and because it's an available language that plays very well with JSON and has a nice sandbox, and I dunno it seems like it's everywhere. Couldn't have made a better choice. I don't understand why all of the sudden it's becoming so popular.
Atwood: Well I think you - the way I understood it - is you finally hooked in JSON and JavaScript - you hooked into the popular - I guess popular isn't the right word, but the common denominator language. A lot of people say 'I get that.' It's not obscure, it's something you can .... And I think in your presentation, you talked about how all of the sudden you were working in the browser - you had downloaded some sort of command-line thing, and you were able to insert data into the database in JavaScript, and all of the sudden it seemed real to you. And that's probably the reaction that a lot of people had right? I don't think that's unique. When you said 'why did it get popular' you gotta think how do we make this accessible to the average developer. And running in the browser - that's pretty accessible.
Katz: To clarify, I'm talking about 'why is JavaScript suddenly so hot?' is my big question. Because it's been around since ... what is it ... '96?
Atwood: But it hasn't really worked until 2005. Because I know for Paul Graham is, "Web 2.0 can be loosely translated as JavaScript now works ... reliably." And that didn't really happen till honestly 2005-2006 in my opinion.
Spolsky: Yes, it was a matter of getting rid of some cross-platform problems. Even just being able to access DOM. I mean the first versions of JavaScript couldn't manipulate DOM, they didn't have dynamic HTML. Do you remember when all you could do is to put an edit boxes up and you could change those but you couldn't like higher paragraphs or something.
Katz: Yeah, and like you could open an alert box and that was like wow. [incomplete]
Spolsky: And it sort looked like a toy language to so many that it didn't get...you know. It has started as a sort of, I guess, a Sheme implementation.
Atwood: Yeah, that's something I learned from a podcast was that the guy who created it was like a Scheme guru or somehting.
Spolsky: [incomplete]
Katz: Yeah, I didn't know that.
Spolsky: It's got the functional programming, it's got the lambdas, it's got some nice stuff in there.
Katz: Yeah, I actually don't know the JavaScript that well. So it was just a dump luck that I picked the right language.
Atwood: You know, it's funny you said you didn't know SQL either. [incomplete]
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Atwood: ... What a great book Code Complete is. In your presentation you said at one point you have analysis paralysis - where you're working on your own thing, there's nobody telling you what to do, and you reach a decision point where you're like "I can't decide what I should be doing or how I'm supposed to be doing this" - there's noone telling me what to do anymore and it's kindof like you don't know what direction to go in, and I believe the slide title was, "Panic," and your solution was to buy a copy of Code Complete. And I'm just imaginging the smoothing, calming voice of Steve McConnell ...
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