Two Banjos At Once: The Blog

The other night my husband and I indulged in some old-fashioned diversion by picking through our collection of 78 r.p.m. records, playing the selections on the 1947 Delco phonograph. He surprised me with a record I’d forgotten we had: Jelly Roll Morton, late in his career, playing Willie “The Lion” Smith’s “Finger Buster;” B-side, “Creepy Feeling.”

We listened to “Creepy Feeling” first. Here was all of Morton’s legendary talent in one side–the ragtime and jazz piano styles he excelled in and defined. We had great expectations for “Finger Buster.”

This piece was also rendered with impressive virtuosity, but ultimately left us cold. The point of it seemed to be for the pianist to cram as many notes into every moment as possible, a challenge Morton met and bested. But getting all those notes in meant he discarded tone, mood, contrast–almost everything that makes a piece of music memorable. “Finger Buster” had no hook.

I’m reminded of “Finger Buster” when I look at some of the ways people write JavaScript. I see cryptic, single-character variable names, rigid adherence to object literal syntax, disdain for whitespace and for comments. Some people seem to treat their applications as the Web equivalent to the Apollo moonshot: everything must be rigorously minimized, milliseconds shaved off like millimeters, as if, say, the rendering of the lightbox on the regional sales division’s intranet login has profound, mission-critical implications.

Still others want to impress with their scripts’ obscuring structure. They don’t want you to understand it readily; they don’t want to provide the f*cking manual for you to read. They want to dazzle you with their finger busters.

Okay, time for a test.

Quick: hum the riff for the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie.” Now do the same for any of Steve Howe’s solos on Tales from Topographic Oceans. Maybe a few of us can do the latter, and some would even prefer it. I confess to a bone-deep dislike for prog rock, and admit bias for “Louie Louie.” I’m not alone–which recording do you think has great influence?

The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”.

Steve Howe in 1971 BBC documentary.

A trick question. Both do. Punk arose in the 1970s from both emulation of the do-it-yourself, technically simple example of 1960s garage bands like the Kingsmen, and contempt for the pretentious, technically complex example of prog groups like Yes. The original punks knew finger busting really doesn’t signify great music. If the music can’t make its point quickly, if you need lots of post-production and exotic instruments and huge concert venues to create it, and if nobody can easily recall what it sounds like, then it’s failed–doesn’t matter how many notes it has.

It’s high time finger busting JavaScript met its punk counterbalance. Too many blog posts, presentations, framework docs, and lines of code seem written with complete disregard for the basics of communication, as if hoarding information makes the writer more powerful. Just as you don’t need conservatory training to make good music, you don’t need an MS in Computer Science to write good JavaScript. My stress is on “good”–is it good if nobody understands it? If nobody can reuse it, add on to it? No. Web development isn’t a cutting contest. Let’s save finger busting for novelty records.