"Two approaches to journalism?" Bullcrap.

Tim Bray posted "Two Approaches to Journalism" in which he said, among other things:

TheServerSide.com ran a story whose title was a lie, without talking to me or anyone, presumably looking for flameage, and they got some.

Well, Tim, in all honesty, I didn't post it looking for a flame. I never do, since I find flamewars to be retarded. However, there's a fine point to be made here.

Look: we didn't quote anything out of context. We pointed to the original thinkphp blog, which posted your slides. We didn't assign quantitative values to what the slides said, because you didn't provide any quantitative data: you just said "PHP gets a 8, Java gets a 4, Ruby gets a 6," without saying what the numbers meant... but it's clear that you were grading them.

Maybe you meant to limit the grades, which is what your rebuttal ("Comparing Frameworks") did. That's good, because context was needed.

However, the fact that you assigned the grades you did was posted to TheServerSide. If you wanted to provide context, you certainly could have, in the slides themselves; you also could have posted the context to your blog ahead of time. The poster didn't post anything untrue. He just didn't have your thought processes available to mitigate the slides' import.

So should I have gotten in touch with you about it? I don't know. The post said:

That page also contains links to the presentation slides on Tim's site. According to him, enterprise systems built on Java are less scalable than PHP-based systems and less maintainable than Ruby-on-Rails-based ones. Also Java-based development is much slower than both PHP and RoR. The only outlined benefit of Java platform is the reach of the development toolkit. Unfortunately, neither slides nor post contained references on how such metrics were measured. It's surprising that Java falls behind - on the slides - in scalability and maintainability to PHP (for scalability) and Rails (in maintainability). It'd be great to see more data on this.

Is this untrue? I pointed out that you didn't provide metrics (which you had not, by that point); I pointed out that the content of the slides implied that you thought PHP was more scalable than Java. If this is factually untrue, say so.

I'm necessarily neutral. I'm a little pro-Java, I guess, but I didn't assign a value judgment to your slides; I only pointed out that they were there. If you were trying to talk to a pro-PHP audience, all fine, all good; you still said it without any qualification I could see. That'd be like me saying "Java sucks!" without any further clarification and expecting people to read extra stuff into it.

So do I apologize? Erm... not really. I'm not happy you think I was irresponsible about it, I suppose, but hey - I think you were irresponsible with the slides in the first place. Provide data, provide context, don't just decide to tell an audience stuff that they want to hear while not expecting anyone else to find out about it.

tags: java  tss  theserverside  tim bray  php