You seem to be making the same effort to miss the point as the man that ran through a litany of objections starting at 45:18.
I don't like the "there are no geniuses" phrase, especially since they then have to back down and say, "Well, it isn't that there are no geniuses -- just that they're extremely rare," which just obscures the point further. The point I think they're trying to make, though, is that the myth of the hero programmer who writes a perfect program and releases it to a world full of unhelpful clods is counterproductive.
If you want to dispute their point, then answer their question: What successful, widely-used project was created entirely by one lone genius?
And they only took off because Linus is not a total dick, and he published his code very early so that collaborators could hack on it. Those two things were important in Linux and Git's success.
Thats all the talk is about. And the only reason anyone is arguing with it is the very insecurity the talk seeks to address.
> And they only took off because Linus is not a total dick
Have you ever seen Linus on usenet? I'd argue that his Real Programmer protective stance towards Linux was more helpful to it taking off than being a really Nice Guy.
>> And they only took off because Linus is not a total dick
> Have you ever seen Linus on usenet?
"Not a total dick" in Internet terms is something like "A little to the left of Mao." However, Linus is also very astute and capable. People will tolerate "does not suffer fools gladly" if they are not a fool, or if they like the person's work.
Every programmer with an ego should ask themselves, "Am I an unjustified asshole?" Consider:
- Do a lot of people mostly like your work?
- Does the cost/benefit of alienating people vs.
shutting down the fools generally work out positively?
(For the community not just for your personal
gratification.)
- Do people complain about you profusely, but for
some reason still grudgingly respect you?
Answer yes 3 times? Congrats: you are not an unjustified asshole!
Are you a delusional asshole?
- Do only a select few understand your work, and do you
think even they are all inferiors?
- Are you *always* right?
- Do the people who are trying to do something valuable
generally try to ignore you?
Answer yes 3 times? Well, don't worry about it, you're probably one of the few who are genuinely ahead of their time and misunderstood. ;-)
What successful, widely-used project was created entirely by one lone genius?
This position is a little oxymoronic since anything successful and widely-used must benefit from the non-zero amount of direct and indirect community feedback. Every project exists in relation to others and if one is superior in some way it's often because the creator decided to improve on something they liked or disliked in another system.
I can do go for that for RoR; but Napster was a much bigger leap in its time than we give it credit for now, and the same for Bram/BT. The BitTorrent protocol was well done, even once P2P was far from an obscure idea.
And all of them were "innovations", not inventions. None of them were original ideas, they were just rehashed ones that were right for the time in which they became popular and widely known.
To be fair to Bram, he had the technical insight to deliver a workable P2P protocol with the ability to distribute demand at a nice granularity. Because of that, his protocol was technically superior to the competitors. Also, he did not try to tackle search and do it badly.
Napster was a bad implementation at the right time.
RoR - credit should be given. Sometimes just getting off your duff and starting something is what the world needs. Motivating many others to refine code into something useful deserves credit.
(EDIT: I am not saying anything was/wasn't a work of genius. I'm just saying it's truly creditable, whatever it was.)
To be truly fair to Bram, he had the insight to take an existing marginally working p2p system that he had previously been employed to develop and strip it down to the essential components needed to shift bits quickly. Innovation, not invention.
I definitely agree with you on Napster. I am less sure about RoR. It was a a very nice improvement over existing systems, but how much of that was DHH genius and how much was simply due to Ruby providing a better platform upon which to build this particular framework I do not know. It was definitely better than existing alternatives in other scripting languages, but I was not a part of the Ruby world at the time and have no idea where the initial RoR work fit in to the whole Ruby ecosystem at the time.
Well, you can write fortran in Ruby, but it took DHH to show where it does shine. It is easy to underestimate the initial insight in hindsight "oh, that's obvious", but it only becomes obvious when someone does it.
And does not definition of geniality has something on having that insight for the "obvious"?
Others had shown were it shines as well; there was Nitro, IOWA, a few other apps that were solid examples of Ruby qua Ruby at the same time as (or prior to) Rails.
Why do some people/code get attention and accolades, while others, equally deserving, do not? Timing? Personality? Bluster?
DHH said (more or less, I forget the exact words) that Rails had no new ideas, just implementations of existing good ones.
Nitro, another MVC-ish Ruby Web framework released at the same time as Rails, always stuck me as being a much better approach to the same problem, and better engineered (thread safe, less "magic" and munging of core Ruby classes, a form of pipeline transformations somewhat similar to Rack middleware today), but for whatever reasons Rails managed to capture far more attention.
The big win for Rails was not the initial code itself, but in capturing attention and motivating people to contribute, to fix it up, and make it better.
I don't like the "there are no geniuses" phrase, especially since they then have to back down and say, "Well, it isn't that there are no geniuses -- just that they're extremely rare," which just obscures the point further. The point I think they're trying to make, though, is that the myth of the hero programmer who writes a perfect program and releases it to a world full of unhelpful clods is counterproductive.
If you want to dispute their point, then answer their question: What successful, widely-used project was created entirely by one lone genius?