Return of the Mystery Machine Bus

Written while the comment threads on the original were still warm, which makes the first half a rarity in the catalogue: Steve answering his critics objection by objection — the "false dichotomy" crowd, the small-government pedants, and the Clojure community's game attempt to market itself out of the conservative column, dispatched with an assist from Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. One caution: the debate lived on Google+, so the rebuttals survive while most of what they rebut does not, and a few stretches now play like one side of a phone call. The ripostes that stand on their own are the good ones. There's a star-ratings defense of lossy single-axis models, the observation that almost nobody feels conservative so the label's fit can't be judged by feel, and a deduction he credits the Clojure folks with being first to make: a programming language can only ever be marketed to half the world's developers.

The back half is all new material, and its best scene is Gregor Kiczales pitching Aspect-Oriented Programming to a room of Amazon Java engineers: a two-line exchange about who gets to fix broken code, capped by a one-sentence coda about Google that lands the same joke twice. Around it Steve argues that how a programmer answers "Do you respect your code?" — Eiffel Tower or box of dynamite — predicts nearly everything else about them, and he finds room to confess that he once wanted to rewrite Emacs in Java. The piece signs off with a callback to his old "Pinocchio Problem" case for living software over dead software, and one final animal joke that will not be repeated here.