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by quietbritishjim
228 days ago
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> Meanwhile there are articles I wrote years ago which explain clearly from first principles why the correct philosophy is ... I think this is a very common mistake. You've spent years, maybe decades, writing code and now you want to magically transfer all that experience in a few succinct articles. But no advice that you give about "the correct philosophy" is going to instantly transfer enough knowledge to make all large companies write good code, if only they followed it. Instead, I'm sure it's valuable advice, but more along the lines of a fragment within a single day of learning for a diligent developer. A company I worked recently had a more extreme version of this mistake. It had software written in the 1980s based on a development process by Michael Jackson (no, not that one!), a software researcher that had spent his whole career trying to come up with silly processes that were meant to fix software development once and for all; he wrote whole books about it. I remember reading a recent interview with him where he mourns that developers today are interested in new programming languages but not development methodologies. (The code base I worked on was fine by the way, given that it was 40 years old, but not really because of this Jackson stuff.) I'm reminded of the Joel on Software article [1] where he compares talented (naturally or through experience) developers as being like really talented expert chefs, and those following some methodology as being like people working at McDonald's. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-na... |
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Good old "Programming as Theory Building". It's almost impossible to achieve this kind of transfer without already having the requisite lived experience.
[0]: https://ratfactor.com/papers/naur1_theory_building.pdf