My Target Audience | The Two Culture Problem

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/9428234

Apr 18, 2023 Matthijs Cox writes:

The “two language problem” was globally accepted for several decades. You just learn to live with it. Until one day it was challenged by the Julia language, a programming language that promises both speed and ease of use. As I feel the pain of the two language problem deeply, I wanted to try out this new solution. So together with several allies I went on a mission to adopt this new technology at work, and remove the bottleneck.

While we had initial success and attention, we quickly stumbled into resistance from the existing groups of researchers/scientists and developers. Over time I have named this the “two culture problem”. In the beginning I didn’t see the cultures clearly, which limited our success. I was too focused on the technological problem itself.

I will refer to the two cultures as “scientists” versus “developers”. However, the “scientists” group generalizes to anyone who codes quick and dirty to explore, such as domain experts, data analysts and others like that. I do hope everyone is doing their exploration somewhat scientifically, so the generalization should makes sense. Scientists typically want to get their stuff done, perhaps with code, but they don't care about the code. Software developers care deeply about the code craftsmanship, sometimes obsessively so, but often developers barely understand the business domain or science. There are people near the middle, trying to balance both, but they are a rare breed.

Read My Target Audience