!(social media)

I will probably get flack for this but I am going to exclude web developers from this discussion of adoption rates about social media in the developer sphere.

Having moved through the technical streams over to the dark side of marketing, I have learned to challenge assumptions and here is one of mine I think needs testing.   In this new age of “social media” and interaction, I have yet to see the leadership in the developer community make any substantive use of it.   I would love to be proved wrong on this one.   Social media, in my view, is really just branding what people have been doing for years: using peers to converse and exchange information on topics and facilitating interaction, even for niche subjects like the merits of static code analysis in mission critical applications.

The adoption rate of the “formal” social media is what I am interested in.  The blogs, twitters, facebook, digg,  etc, you know the brands that I mean.  I have been looking for weeks to find any concrete data on adoption rate and have been hard pressed to find much.

• Technorati  (March 2008- State of the Blogosphere) – 26.4 million blogs vs less than a handful about software development.
• Google Trends indicates that the ratio of software blogging to the main stream is 258 times less.
• Digg has just over 18583 diggs for software development versus over 3 million for marketing
• Twitter volumes are similar 13 900 versus 1.4 million

Why hasn’t the paradigm shift happen here like in other industries?  Online marketers are eating up social networking on Himalayan scale, so why not in development circles.  Speculating on human behaviour is not without its caveats but are technical people so different from say marketers or bus dev people?  In a nut shell – yes.

It’s  not to say developers aren’t social, in many ways the development community has been the leading the wave [Yes, that is an intentional pun for the upcoming Google Wave]. I would argue that software development has been social for well over a decade as best exemplified by the open source movement.  Some of the greatest advancements in software design and productivity have come from major collaborative efforts such as the  LAMP stack, OpenOffice and Android just to name a tiny few and open source has lead to the rise and fall or changed of direction in many a company – see Apple adopting the Linux kernel etc.

My conclusion on all this: the software development community has voted with their feet.  They do not need yet another vehicle to find their voice when they already use mechanisms (open source collaboration, forums, community websites etc) that do the job quite nicely thank you very much.

So if you disagree, take up the sword and prove otherwise.

PS. And yes I get the irony of writing a social media piece about software development on a blog. :-)

Just returned from ESC San Jose, where I spent a very enjoyable few days surrounded by the “real men” of the programming world. Forget your managed language environments, forget abstractions or object oriented fantasies of design, forget processes like Agile, these guys spend their days down at board level working in assembler and occasionally sticking their heads up into the rarified world of C (but only, you know, for stuff that doesn’t really matter…).

Hell, most of the time the hardware they’re programming is custom built just for that project, sans O/S because, you know, why would you want that crap to get in your way. One guy that stands out in the procession of awesomeness was describing his ASIC to me, asking if we could help with stack overflow problems, and launched into a necessarily abstracted description of the fact that their (classified) device didn’t really have a stack, actually, but it was kind of a well known address range that they normally treated like a stack, although not always because, you know, stuff sometimes gets in the way, so if he, like, stuck something in there that was too big, could we tell him?

God, I love these guys…

Now I began programming on boards in Z80 assembler, so trust me that I do actually know what the heck they’re doing and why, but over time I’ve followed what has felt like a fairly natural migration away from the kind of “if I want to light up that LED I have to store 0x2d in address ‘x’” programming to C, then C++, and more recently to Java and C#. Of them all, I think C++ is probably my favorite, simply because it’s low-level enough to be useful, and high-level enough to let me express myself without having to think too much about it. Frankly, in my opinion while good developers are good in any language, really good developers find their own way and then excel at it. So yes, I can probably program in any language given a few days of spin-up time, but frankly I’m too old and too cranky to get all fired up over the latest innovation of hiding-the-useful-stuff-from-me just so I can do it a bit faster.

Note that I’m not espousing any kind of intelligentsia-sponsored BS argument over the “value” of OO languages over procedural or vice versa (for more vitriol than typically fits on one page, check out this beauty from Torvalds…). And no, I don’t use STL so just shoot me, but it sucks so get over it. And if you get your rocks off over Python or Ruby or Haskell or whatever new lambda calculus-based micro language you’ve just stumbled over, have fun and get your job done, there’s enough of them for everybody, after all.

But don’t try to convert me. Proselytizing is always ugly, so just step away from the bong and let’s all be friends here. The Urban Dictionary nicely summarizes things:

The men who program in C++ are Real Men. The women who program in C++ are Real Men too.

Substitute the name of your favorite language in there in place of C++ and you’ve got the way most developers think about their own language of choice. How about you? Any favorites out there you’re willing to get boiled in the pot for?