| My essays have been on
programming and education. An early one written
in 2007, was Why I am Not a
Professor, which expressed my
disillusion with academic life. This was closely
followed by The Bipolar Lisp
Programmer; my exploration of why
brilliant students sometimes fail at university.
Both these essays were well received and gathered
wide attention. This surprised me because I had
written them as personal reflections on my life
experiences than as popular articles. But they were
well received, which is more than can be said for
my next piece The Cathedral
and the Bizarre; a conscious attack on
Eric S. Raymond's The Cathdral and the Bazaar.
My essay took square aim at the Open Source
movement and the result backlash was pretty
predictable. However some more thoughtful spirits
acknowledged that the essay had a point. This was
followed by Free as in 'Do
as you're told'; a deconstruction of
the flawed software ideology of Richard Stallman.
This attracted little attention because by then
my critics had walked off in a huff.
Raymond's
philosophy of 'Release often and release
early' as applied to software development
did not find an echo in me. In contradistinction
I wrote The Shen of Shen
which
emphasised dediication, time and craftmanship.
Years
later, when my followers were embroiled in a
fight with a deletionist on Wikipedia, I wrote a
piece In Defence of
Open Science, because of the bizarre
editorial policy being pursued. It wasn't my
fight, in a sense, because I never put my work up
in Wikipedia, but something needed to be said
about censorship.
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