9#39
Acolytes (4.76 / 17) (#39)
by epepke on Wed Oct 16th, 2002 at 11:32:08 PM EST

I categorize people a little differently, as novices, acolytes, and experts. One of the things that has happened and has driven computing in a direcion that makes me unhappy has been the predominance of acolytes over the past few years.

Traditionally, the term "acolyte" has meant someone studying to be a priest. A computer acolyte is somewhere between an amateur and an expert, who very much wants to think of him and/or herself as n expert but isn't quite there yet.

Hard systems are for acolytes, not experts. When you get into the expertlevel, the tools get simpler. Consider cooking. A blender for the home cooking acolyte typically has buttons for 14 different speeds, labeled creatively as chop, whip, beat, liquefy, puree, and nine others. If you go into a restaurant, the blender has a single toggle switch: on and off. The acolyte will use a Kitchen Magician or a food processor; the chef will use a knife. The acolyte will have a smart, self-cleaning range and oven with all sorts of features. The chef has a chunk of iron with fire inside it.

The acolyte gets off on the niftiness of a complex system, because succesfully using the system is in and of itself an ego boost. Acolytes also love words like "professional," which originally applied only to medicine, clergy, and law, but which is a good chest-swelling word. The disdain for anything but Emacs is an acolyte characteristic; experts generally don't give a rat's and just use what they have. I've been doing this stuff for a quarter of a century, and I think I'm an expert. Back during the dot com boom, when the world was swarming with acolytes, I was talking to another expert. He said that on his resume, as one of the tools he knew for web development, he put "notepad." I thought this was great.

Novices generally prefer simple tools that do one thing they want to do. Acolytes prefer complex tools. Experts prefer simple tools that have the property of synchronicity. Un*x is an expert system not particularly because it is complex, but because it's synchronistic. There isn't a single executable in Un*x which is anywhere near as complex as, say, MS office, but the tools fit together in ways that allow the expert to do anything.

Another thing is that acolytes feed acolytes. Acolytes are good at producing programs that satisfy acolytes. You need experts, though, to produce tools that will satisfy novices or experts, and experts often look at acolyte tools with some disdain, talking about featuritis and windowitis.