Compound Thinking

Motivate me when I’m dead…

It think the very idea that motivation can be “imparted” in a morning meeting, or a half day seminar is kind of demeaning.

Motivation is a complex network of hopes, dreams, fears, needs, frustrations, incentives, and personal morality. Motivating people is as much about connecting their individual aspirations to the goals of the organization as anything. If people can do what’s right, become who they want to be, and get paid to do it, that’s a far more powerful motivator than you can get from any meeting.

If those things are true, you can skip the motivational meeting. Everybody would rather sit down and get some work done. And if they aren’t true it’s not likely that another meeting will help.

For some (very small) values of done…

What does done mean? Somebody was telling me that Ruby 1.9 was “pretty much done” last night.

What is Ruby 1.9? Do we have a spec? A test suite? Anything? If the answer is no, it’s not ready.

–Charels Nutter (in a comment here)

Partly that’s because Charels wants 1.9 as a reference implementation — not just usable interpreter.

But, that highlights one of the reasons I like the way python is developed. There is a test suite, there is a reasnably complete set of specifications. So, from here, it looks like Python 3 is a lot “more done” than Ruby 1.9. But that’s OK, they are both way more done that Perl 6. ;)

I’m still looking forward to Ruby 1.9, and python 3.0.