Dissing Barney

I see this tendency among technologists to strongly criticize older technologies, without admitting the contribution that they have made to the current state-of-the-art. You can see this particularly as people rail against structured programming, 'C', Unix etc. etc. I compare this to adoloscents criticizing Barney. It sounds stupid. -- SamShard?

Are you sure you don't mean DissingBjarne?, which is a perfectly legitimate exercise among Smalltalk programmers? -- KyleBrown

OK, I'm willing to learn. Please bring me up to date on what contributions Barney has made to the state-of-the-art. --RonJeffries

Barney is full of wisdom. He says "we take turns so we'll all have fun." I've come to the realization that "taking turns" is a concept that can be used to explain much of the world to a two or three year old. Everything from traffic lights to why daddy gets to watch Crossfire at night. If kids learn that lesson well, PairProgramming may become easier for the next generation. TeleTubbies are cool too.

Actually, I think Barney's a great metaphor for this. And I think dissing Barney is an excellent thing.

The problem with Barney is that it is deliberately tailored to the interests of toddlers (as perceived by adults) and only to those interests. I have read interviews with the Barney-perpetrators. If they test-screen an episode and adults laugh at a joke, they take the joke out. Barney isn't for adults. Barney is for toddlers. Compare Sesame Street, which puts in anything the creators enjoy. Sometimes the toddlers get the jokes; some jokes sail right over the toddlers' heads and amuse their parents. (Think about Monsterpiece Theater, for instance.) This means that Sesame Street, every so often, stumbles on to great art -- Savion Glover, for instance, or such brilliant songs as I'd Like to Visit the Moon or Rubber Duckie -- which works on multiple levels. Barney has never, in my experience, created any art of lasting value. I think that the deliberately-limited audience has a lot to do with this. Sesame Street gives kids room to grow; Barney says "this, and only this, is appropriate for you."

So how does this tie into software engineering? People who admire the great achievements of the '50s, '60s or '70s, and who refuse to take notice of important events since then, are stuck in Barney mode. Everything important has been done. People who admire both the great work of their predecessors and the great work being done by contemporaries are on the Sesame Street plane. --Betsy [block that metaphor!] Hanes Perry

On the other hand, the television program BluesClues shows that a kids-only show can be genuinely delightful and interesting, or it can be if you don't watch it more than once or twice. Odd that a commercial operation like Nick Jr. [http://www.nickjr.com/] can produce a product superior to the nominally non-profit PBS.

This is only odd if your ideology precludes the possibility.

Relevancy to patterns: There's a "habitability" issue here. The Barney universe is not extensible (and, in fact, is horribly derivative). If a kid likes Barney, a parent has to buy the Barney products to continue the experience. Blue's Clues, on the other hand, can be played at home with the assistance of an older sibling -- it encourages thinking by showing that it's okay to be wrong and that it's okay to make conclusions based on insufficient information.

The Clues are iconographic, by the way. It's almost hypertextual to see what happens when Steve finds a clue-marked object. Besides, Steve played a homicidal teenager on Homicide which gave me the oddest feeling of cognitive dissonance. I wanted to yell out to the detectives, "A clue! A clue!" -- KenMeltsner

The original post was using Barney just as an analogy and it looks like the metaphor is being taken too literally. Barney is in the sole business of entertaining kids - not creating art. And it seems to do a satisfactory job at that. The problem is with the adult who expects "art of lasting value" and disses Barney when he can't find it there.

FORTRAN, C, Unix etc. etc. have been great steps in the path of evolution of software engineering. Their important contributions have been subsumed into OO and will be present in the technology of tomorrow. That is why, railing against them - by scholars, academics and other bigots is sophomoric.

This seems to happen in other fields too - Medicine (the doctors 30 years ago were stupid...) comes to mind. -- SamShard?

Thanks for returning us to the point. However, I must not be listening, because I don't hear a lot of railing against all these technologies. I mostly hear railing against Java and C++. Is there a newsgroup I'm missing? Thanks! --RonJeffries

Never suspected this stupid page will get this long. did ya Ron? Anyways, a lot of the railing against C++ (may be even Java) is because they are considered C like. Read ObjectOrientedSoftwareConstruction.

Well, sure, but as we say around Chrysler, BertrandMeyer is a bitter, bitter man. One suspects it's because he (thinks he) had such a wonderful idea and the universe has not beat a path to his door.

How come the OO mantra about evolving systems does not apply to languages? Why should language design always be done from scratch?

Name me a language developed since, oh, 1956, that was designed from scratch? I don't think any of the ones I use were

I think it is important to keep an eye open to the DissingBarney phenomenon in any forum where there is wide exchange of opinions, because it is a technique used to attract attention to a particilar viewpoint -- SamShard?

The IT industry seems to be the only place where `legacy' is a dirty word. Anywhere else it means somebody left you some money. -- DanBarlow