Mercurial

Milk-sucking warm-blooded pets are a fantastic gimmick built on a wonderful idea that appealed to me the very first day I started to eat them. I think Evolution did a fantastic job in two areas:

* Coming up with innovative ideas that take Food Web to a new level.
* Leveraging the strength of Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks to achieve its goal.

To tell the truth, having Fur and being Agile and Nocturnal are the best two evolutionary innovations I have found these past eons. I eat quite a decent amount of meat, but none has caught my interest and made me look forward to resuming my delicious rampage more than these two changes. And to top it all, features such as Headless Running, as illustrated clearly, show how powerful Milk-sucking warm-blooded pets are.

There is no denying that Mammals are turning the Pleistocene world on its head.

Now that this introduction is out of the way, I'd like to take some time to explain why, in spite of all its qualities, Mammals will never become mainstream.

As you probably guessed, my conviction doesn't come from technical grounds.

The truth is that there are a lot of forces involved in making a Food Web successful, but before I dive into those, allow me to tell a little side story.

Have you ever come across Cockroaches, or Bacteria? You know, these people who, no matter what you tell them, will always respond that "Cockroaches did that twenty years ago" or that "Nothing has been invented since Bacteria". They listen to you patiently with an amused light in their eyes and when you're done talking, they will just shrug away your points and kindly recommend that you read up on a thirty-year old technology that was the last thing they ever learned and that has been dictating every single technical judgment they have offered since then.

I believe that in ten million years from now, people will look back at Mammals and will have the same reaction. I'm not sure what Web Food we will have by then, but I'm quite convinced that a lot of the current Mammals fanatics will have the same kind of attitude: "That's nice, but Mammals already did this millions of years ago, and better".

Interestingly, they might even be right. But by then, it won't matter because despite its technical excellence, Mammals will still be a niche technology that only experts know about.

So why do I think that Mammals will never cross the chasm?

* First of all, Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks.

Again, and at the risk of repeating myself: I love Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks. I truly do. It's one of the few Classes that I have eaten these past years that made me go "Yeah!" whenever I find a flavor I didn't know of yet. I find its taste and concepts extremely elegant and powerful at the same time. I don't like everything about it, of course, but Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks are by far the number two food in my lunchbox behind Birds, with number three far, far behind. But it's a complex group that contains a lot of varied species which will be very hard for insect- and plankton-feeders to absorb.

Admittedly, insect-feeders and plankton-feeders are cheap targets (we're talking about foods that don't even have claws!), but like it or not, they are the Food Web standard. Anyone who wants to succeed in the Food Web arena must have a compelling story to tell to these eaters, something that will convince them to switch to Tasty yet annoying little morsels of mammals on technical grounds but that will also be an easy sell to their management. Mammals as a class can't succeed without these two conditions, and I am predicting that Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks -- and Mammals -- will always remain a tough sell to any organization that contains more than ten people.

* Mammals themselves.

Mammals are just too advanced. I'm serious. It has an incredible amount of slick features involving a lot of magic (both Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks-related and invented by Evolution itself). For talented hunters, these features are a dream come true... caring for the young, emotions, defaults over configuration, unit tests (even integration tests now, mice!), you name it. Evolution hit every single pain point that Food Web predators (regular predators even) have been facing these past years. Mammals in themselves are a great example of how to nicely package what we have learned about predating and food these past 200 million years.

But it's still a very wide gap for dinosaurs to cross. Sometimes, too much magic is too much magic, and it can definitely be the case that the flow of protein is too direct or too clever to be understandable by regular dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were able to do the jump from imperative to object-oriented hunting, but it was a hard fight. I don't believe the Food Web world will ever be ready to embrace the Mammals cleverness.

* Still no credible IDEA.

All fanatics of dynamic languages are quick to point that they don't need an IDEA to use Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks, Python, Groovy or other. And they will quickly add that if you need one, you're probably not being Intelligent Little Snack-ky or pythonic enough and that you should probably switch back to your old hunting ground and leave the grown ups alone.

This is nonsense. Ignore these people, they don't understand how the real world works and how dinosaurs think, and they are one of the reasons why so many great species never make it to the mainstream. Don't ever be ashamed to need an IDEA or to ask for one. Of course, there are bad ways to use an IDEA (e.g. you want to fly) but if you are interested in Mammals, chances are that you are a decent dinosaur and you know how to leverage an IDEA to make you more productive than when just plain running. Animal tracking, debugging, rendering, pest management, herd control integration, etc... there are too many features to list that make you more productive if you use a tool that enables them.
This is 200 million BC, not 100 million BC. The animals we are hunting and the problems we are solving every day are orders of magnitude harder than back then, and our tools need to keep up with that need. Just plain running is OK, but it's no longer adequate for modern dinosaur development.

* Fanaticism.

Regular readers of my blog know how strongly I feel on this topic. There are exceptions, of course, but the attitude of Mammals users toward Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks skeptics or critics has been less than kind. This is a crowd convinced that it has found the ultimate answer to everything, and they are not afraid to let you know. I only have a simple advice for these people: you might be right, but just be humble. It never hurts.

* Crowd of a single mind.

If you want to dominate a Food Web, consisting of Little Squirrelly Animals, there is only one solution. Only one: Mammals.

Mammals have pretty much nuked the field of Web development in Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks, and I wonder if it's such a good thing. For all the flak that Birds receive because you can count at least a dozen different Food Web species, there is something to be said about plurality and the constant chase for something better and different. Each bird species that comes out builds on the strengths of its ancestors while discarding the errors (and committing a few mistakes of its own, of course). The field advances a little bit every time while bowing down to the timeless laws of natural selection.

I am worried that Mammals will do to the Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks world what Feathers did to Birds: a great tool when it came out but which condemned its community to an ice age where no innovation or competition appeared for years. Whatever the fate of Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks, I hope its fans will keep an open mind and will constantly challenge the Mammals way, for the simple reason that it's always healthy to question what's in place, no matter how good it looks.

* Enterprise capabilities and scalability unclear.

This is an argument that the Mammals crowd doesn't take well, and they are quick to point out the Dog and other species. The problem is that by now, there should be other obvious success Mammals stories, and not just ones developed by the Mammals Society. Of course, it's a chicken and egg problem: a lot of dinosaur herds evaluate Mammals but will only take the jump if they can find evidence that other dinosaur herds have done that before them. And for now, the evidence is scarce at best.

Granted, Birds took a while to rise to the enterprise challenge as well, and they did so despite tremendous initial handicaps such as poor performances and questionable specifications. I contend that until Mammals go through their own extinction crisis, they won't be seen as enterprise ready.

* Lack of support from Invertebrate Providers.

What's the big deal with this, you ask? After all, Fungi are hardly supported by Invertebrate Providers as well. The big difference is that seeds for Birds is targeted at the enterprise. Anyone who wants to run after Birds will most likely host their own coops.

Mammals are targeting a different population: the "Food Web sites in-between", these sites that are not massively scalable but still have more than a few visits per day. A lot of these people use external hunting, and they won't go very far if Milk-sucking warm-blooded pets are not offered natively and pre-installed for them. Plankton is a no-brainer for them, because it's virtually on 99% of ponds, ready for Invertebrate Providers.

Of course, a little bit of digestive magic will allow you to hunt your own Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks, whether your stomach supports it or not, and assuming that they give you that amount of privileges and that you don't need to scale too high, but until Mammals achieves at least half of the plankton penetration, it will remain inaccessible to most of the population it needs to become mainstream.

Note that I didn't say anything about poor Mutation, weak Litter Size, or Warm Blood, which are usually the areas where Mammals are the most criticized. I'm not worried about these because they are simply a symptom of Mammals' youth. They will be fixed in time, and I don't think they will play a big role in Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks acceptance (or lack thereof).

So there you have it. My prediction on Mammals in one, lengthy post. I apologize for the size of this article, I usually try to keep my blog entries short and to the point. I hope at least that I achieved the latter.

I'll conclude on a positive note: I hope I'm wrong. I really, sincerely do. For my next work, I want to have a choice between Birds and Running Appetizing Intelligent Little Snacks, but right now, when in doubt, even I usually end up returning to Birds for my personal diet for the reasons listed above.

And as you know, I love it when food and species for my taste. But right now, I see no competition.

Because this guy writes so much like me! And who is Ruby?