Wednesday, September 22, 2004
« Science fiction and SOA | Main | Object Thinking »
Blind polling in politics - would it work for technology?

My son’s 6th grade class recently did an exercise where they voted on the US presidential candidates based entirely on the issues and positions set forth by each candidate. But it was a blind poll – the kids didn’t know who was who. The results were surprising! Click here for my wife’s write-up of the event and the parental reaction.

 

But it got me thinking. What would happen if you did the same thing with a room full of computer geeks, comparing the features put forth by different tools and technologies. Some ideas:

 

  • Java vs .NET
  • VB vs C#
  • Web services vs Remoting
  • Web services vs DCOM

 

And the list goes on…

 

But seriously. It would be very interesting to see how people “voted” for a technology based purely on its stated feature set rather than on the largely subjective criteria we use in most cases.

 

By largely subjective I mean, for instance, that most pro-.NET people choose it because it comes from Microsoft. Most Java people choose Java because it doesn’t come from Microsoft. But if you did a blind poll, which would be chosen? I don’t know, but I think it would be an interesting exercise!

Wednesday, September 22, 2004 9:58:14 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [1]  | 
Wednesday, September 22, 2004 10:45:06 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Interesting question. The problem of course would be running it in a suitably blind fashion.

Asking kids to decide between politicians on issues has the advantage that probably, most of them have not spent much time looking in to who stands for what. Repeat the same experiment on the kid’s parents and you should get a different answer – although perhaps not for the correct reasons. It is likely that amongst the policies they would recognise one or two, and then use that to decide which candidate they "should" vote for – rather than actually deciding on the issues.

The point being, the kids choice is interesting but moot – they are not of voting age. The same applies to developers – they are the parents, as it were! Those who were already using one or the other have probably read the arguments raging over the ‘net, and would recognise the perceived benefits of there chosen camp, and vote how they should. This would be difficult to get around as some of the points would be fairly obvious. If "platform one" in the .NET vs. Java debate has platform independence as a key benefit, guess which that is!

I guess what I’m saying is that a rational debate on platforms and technologies like this is about as likely as a rational debate on politics :-)
Tim Ensor
Comments are closed.