Britt’s Second Try lapsing back into irrelevance any day now

Just use it and you’ll see

Yesterday a colleague and I gave an informal tech talk about JQuery. (It’s kind of funny that I gave talk about a JavaScript library since I haven’t written anything that’s even seen browser in over year, at least at work.) We ran through a couple of different bits of demo code: showed off the cool CSS-style selectors, showed how to use its AJAX functions, and finally wrote an accordion control in just a few lines. Having tried to write JavaScript to do this circa 2000, I thought this last one was particularly impressive.

Then another co-worker chimed in “I like Prototype. Why not just use Prototype?” (paraphrased). I replied with, “JQuery’s a lot smaller so it reduces page load time. Plus look at the syntax. Its great. Really, its like writing LISP.” It’s not a very convincing argument. Honestly I don’t have a great argument, it’s mostly just qualia. He’s right prototype does all of the same things and works just fine. Now I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about the relative merits of Prototype vs. JQuery. Maybe if I did I could better articulate my preference. My best counter-argument is, “Try it. Build something non-trivial with it and you’ll feel the difference.”

I run into this problem when trying to explain to people why they should do Test Driven Development (TDD) as well. You can present them studies showing that it doesn’t take that much more time and reduces bugs. But they say, “Well that’s what we have an QA department for.” and “You can’t catch all the bugs a good QA tester can because you can’t implement every scenario.” To which I respond “TDD is a design methodology not a verification methodology.” Even so, I still often get “Well I just don’t think it will work for me.” This may be a bit different than my previous example. These folks may just be resistant to facts. However, information from a study or some such is pretty distant so it’s understandable that it doesn’t sway people. Again, I think personal experience makes a much stronger argument. The thing that really made TDD click for me was when I committed to try it for a week as an experiment. Just doing it and experiencing a “Man, programming is easy.” moment made a better argument than anything anyone could say.

What I’m really wondering is how do you get people to do their own experiment? How do you get them to just try it?