[chef-dev] Re: Dialect support and loading enhancements

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Sep 19, 2013, at 9:39 PM, Adam Jacob 
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 wrote:

> It's interesting to hear you say you feel like you don't know how to 
> program, when i've seen you be an effective member of our community for a 
> long time now. Is it completely out of school to say that perhaps you're 
> arguing for your limitations? You might not be a CS major - lord knows, I'm 
> not. But you do know how to program, and you're doing it in ruby. :) The 
> closest you've come to a real programming language is Ruby: you're 
> programming in it, and have been the entire time you've rocked the Chef, an 
> you've done so successfully.

I have a BSCS from the College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, 
technically dated 1990 although I completed my last bit of work in 1989.  
While at University, in terms of formal programming languages I learned 
COBOL, FORTRAN, IBM System 360 Assembly, Prolog, and others.  I'm old enough 
that I actually pre-date ANSI-C, and I have both 1st and 2nd editions of K&R. 
 The first program I ever wrote was an implementation of a complete "choose 
your own adventure" book in Basic, on a Commodore Vic-20, when I was 14 -- it 
was kinda-semi-sorta Zork-like, although I didn't learn about Zork until many 
years later.

But none of that is to say that I am a natural programmer -- I know and work 
with guys who literally eat, breathe, sleep, and dream in code, and the very 
best I can do is try to fake it as best I can and hope that no one notices.  
I have always been good at solving problems, but I work with guys who are 
just a few years out of high school and they can code circles around me.  
They are natural programmers -- not me.

Just because I'm not a natural programmer doesn't mean that I can't recognize 
one when I see them, and it doesn't mean that I can't appreciate their 
talent.  I can also see that their talent in this area is closely related to 
my talents, but is actually separate and unique -- there are some who have 
talent in both areas, but that's not me.


If you take the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation aptitude tests, you will 
discover that they have three different related but separate aptitudes that 
they have detected over the years that relate to music.

One is the ability to distinguish between tones, the second is memory for 
tones, and the third is memory for rhythm.  A good musician will score high 
in all three areas -- no matter how much you practice, no matter how much you 
may want it, if you don't score high in all three areas you simply will not 
be a good and successful musician.

I score high in the first area, but incredibly low (in the single-digit 
percentile) in the other two.  I always knew that I enjoyed listening to 
music but I was really horribly bad at playing music.  Until I took the JOCRF 
tests, I never understood why this was the case.  Now I do.

For dexterity, JOCRF has determined that there are three different but 
related aptitudes.  One is hand-eye coordination, the second is finger 
dexterity, and the third is tweezer dexterity.  For some people, if you ask 
them to do fine dexterity tasks with their fingers, well they don't call them 
"butter fingers" for nothing.  But those same people can be a virtuoso with a 
tool in their hand.  If you're a successful brain surgeon, then you are 
guaranteed to score very high in all three areas -- you simply can't be 
successful in surgery (and especially brain surgery) if you don't.


Likewise, for programming vs. computer operations, I am convinced that there 
are at least two different but closely related aptitudes, and I believe that 
I score relatively high in one of them and low in the other.  Some people are 
the reverse.  And a very few people will score well in both areas.

It has been my experience that a lot of people who score well in both areas 
do not understand that there is a distinction between these two aptitudes, 
and despite meaning well, they can say and do things that I believe are ... 
not really useful to helping us move the respective Dev and Ops communities 
forward.

> My concern really boil down to this: I don't want to say that there will be 
> a simpler path that turns out to just be a ghetto - an underserved, less 
> loved corner of Chef.

Then don't let it turn into a ghetto.  ;-)

> Having someone like Noah who is committed to seeing it through goes a long 
> way to solving that concern, in that I totally believe he would be an 
> active maintainer of that functionality. 
> 
> Thinking out loud: what if we wrapped it in a feature flag and marked it 
> experimental?

For some of what I would want, I think we already have that functionality -- 
it's called SpiceWeasel.  How could we make that sort of thing more 
integrated, so that at least the majority of the community could use that 
functionality out-of-the-box without having to use a separate tool?

--
Brad Knowles 
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LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>