Troll!

There used to be this thing, in the Usenet world of yesteryear (like in the 90s!), which was called a troll, which is a post that is meant to create a lot of discussion. For example, I used to read and post to a group called soc.college. Most people there believed in affirmative action, but there was one guy who stoutly did not, and would claim that it was racist to have affirmative action. Needless to say, this generated a lot of discussion, and not of the civil variety.

I'm starting to realize that this is what Joel Spolsky does. He doesn't want to write stuff that's so abstruse that only Alexandrescu understands. No one would read his blog. He doesn't want to make vaguely bland pronouncements. Instead, he wants to be provocative, but in an almost reasonable way.

For example, he recently ranted on JavaSchools (as he refers to them), which are computer science departments that have switched to Java. This is, to his dismay, making it challenging to detect smart people (boo-hoo, Joel!), but the rant is provocative enough that this is my second entry on it, because I suddenly had an epiphany: Joel is trolling!

OK, not the most profound epiphinany as epiphinies go (how do you make that plural?).

But why? Why do this? Because Joel is not Google. He is not Microsoft. He is not Apple. You haven't heard of Fog Creek Software, which sounds like it might write software for bluegrass musicians. And he wants the best. The way he does this is through his blog, through his writings, through word of mouth.

So, when people say, hey that Joel is being an ass, and hey, that Joel is so right about the demise of modern computer science education, it's exactly the kind of response he wants. He's not so dumb as to make this pronouncement sound completely like the rantings of a madman, even as he boils down programming guru-dom to understanding recursion and pointers, he takes precautions to talk about learning functional languages, and working through tough courses, advice that is reasonable, even as it's mired in histrionics.

Joel Spolsky, you are a troll!

And a mighty effective one at that!