Church of the TigerBeetle: A Look at Tech Evangelism
wespiser.comThis article is no better than what it criticises.
Passing a Jepsen test is great, but saying that you passed a Jepsen test is apparently some kind of hollow performance art, which has nothing to do with writing software?
They've been putting out high quality detailed information for years. It's not their fault if you attended a cinematic fluff piece.
Your comment reinforces some of what the author is saying.
His criticism wasn't for or against TigerBeetle, it was against the religious 'mode of persuasion'.
`The faith isn’t needed. We need to let the work stand on its merits — show the receipts, empower people with the facts and reason, and trust them to make the right calls.`
> The other place I’ve seen tech evangelism is in Haskell, specifically the belief that strongly typed programs are a better way to build software.
Interesting, I'm newer to the field so I say I saw this more particularly with the rewrite in rust crowd, yes rust does have certain aspects better than cpp but does not mean every cpp project would benefit from a rust rewrite. Also is the claim on strongly type programs true? like is it better overall or just better given some specific points?
Would you like the claim on strongly-typed programs to be true/false? Or would you like it to be true/false/null. Or 0 or not-0. Or truthy. Or uninitialised memory.
Hmm, it’s a conference talk? Conferences are for networking and promotion.
Furthermore, considering the current state of affairs in software dev, anyone evangelising software quality is going to get some benefit of the doubt from me.
I've noticed this is common in the Zig community. Look at how antagonistic they are towards languages like Rust, look at how Kelly behaves, calling Github staff slurs because the platform isn't perfect, crashing out about Bun migrating to Rust and calling Sumner a bad developer and manager, the list goes on and on. So it's not surprising that community breeds this kind of discourse.
That extrapolation is doing some serious work. From a salesy conference talk all the way to the Zig community being toxic from the top down. Impressive axe grinding.
> It’s tech evangelism, and that scares the shit out of me.
I am sorry, but how is this new and why is this scary? The article doesn't make a case for this being genuinely scary.
The author may have a valid point or two, but at the end of the day, it's not that big of a deal. Everyone over promotes their products because it is in their interest to do so.
> Evangelism is considered harmful as an organizational technology.
Ok, I don't disagree there.
> Second, evangelism suppresses dissent
Good point.
But still, it's not a big deal.