Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

In particular there are some people who, in Kevin Bourrillion's words, “lack the empathy gene.” You aren't going to be a good API designer or language designer if you can't put yourself in the shoes of an ordinary programmer trying to use your API or language to get something done. Some people are good API and language designers, though. Then there are people who are stunningly good at the technical aspects of language design where they can say, “Oh, this will make the thing not LALR(1) and you need to tweak it in just such a way.” That's an incredibly useful skill. But it's no substitute for having the empathy gene and knowing you have this awful language that's unusable. I know other people who are stunningly good at extracting that last percentage of performance. You want to put them in a position where that's what they're doing. They'll be happy and they'll do good stuff for your company. I think you've got to figure out what your engineers are good at and use them for that. So that's my apologia for why I suck at tools. Lame, I know.