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I haven't finished reading the whole thing yet, but its already really good. Its so well put, that if I were ever hiring again, I would include a test to determine if we are dealing with a conservative or a liberal.

My only reservation is that I haven't been able to find a good coding libertarian joke to make...But, I'm working on it.

Mike

They've established a psychological basis in fear response correlating to certain political views, and I think it makes sense that some engineering decisions can be driven by fear.

So I don't reject his premise outright.

But I found none of his examples compelling.

The details of the project should be would inform the software decisions.

Strong typing is excellent for fault averse systems like, a NASA rover, or banking systems.

But insisting that it *has* to be used in a wootoff monitor?

So clearly he must be talking about people having differing opinions on the same project.

I can't figure out where I am on the scale, since as a sysadmin, I care greatly about fault tolerance of an application, but also know that a simple application fails far less than an over-engineered one.

You have made a very good clarification, in that the concept works with regards to how two people look at the same project.

I also wonder though, if he is right that there is something in a persons philosophy that then lends them better toward one line of work or another. Maybe the best NASA programmer would not do so well for WOOT and visa versa.

At heart, I'm a coding liberal. When we were doing multi-billion dollar payment processing, I knew the conservative philosophy was necessary, and I could do it, but I never loved.

Mike
P.S. You are a coding liberal. I can provide ample evidence if need be.

Does the evidence involve me preferring in-line curly brackets?

And you did specify coding. Does it break his hypothesis if I'm a coding liberal (since I mainly write smaller tools and apps), but a conservative systems architect?

The evidence begins with a java applet you wrote for a railway company and continues from there.

Are you a conservative systems architect? I would say your solutions are unconventional and genius in such a way that would make a conservative say, "Did the vendor consultants approve that solution?"

You get results that a conservative wants, but you don't employ their methods.

Mike
P.S. Yes, your affinity for PERL is more evidence for liberal bias.

I'll grant the Perl thing. Although it is interesting that the biggest conflict Jason and I have is that I will always write a program in pure shell if I can, since I think that is more maintainable by whoever comes next than your average perl.

So is Jason's "Perl by default for everything" mean he is more liberal than me? =)