I’m taking the following as an axiom: Exposing real pre-emptive threading with shared mutable data structures to application programmers is wrong. …It gets very hard to find humans who can actually reason about threads well enough to be usefully productive.
When I give talks about this stuff, I assert that threads are a recipe for deadlocks, race conditions, horrible non-reproducible bugs that take endless pain to find, and hard-to-diagnose performance problems. Nobody ever pushes back.
October 26, 2009
Threading is Wrong
June 22, 2009
(Hyper)Text is King of Substance
…I’d rather have the text of Clay’s speech than the video. For things that matter, written words are unambiguously better than speech. To start with, anything that matters isn’t just written, it’s usually rewritten repeatedly (and more important, condensed). Plus, it has hyperlinks. Plus, it’s smaller and cheaper to ship around. Plus, it’s searchable. Plus, it works on more devices. (I acknowledge that only the first of these is fundamental; but that alone would be enough).
Videos, speech, etc. will always carry more emotional content. But for consuming ideas, text offers the highest bandwidth and most precision. Unfortunately, writing well takes time, and can hinder conversation.
Conceptually, I believe illustrative pictures and infographics are valid elements of modern text, like links, or typography.