A little background . . .
Joel Spolsky writes articles about software development and often times ends up saying that unit tests aren’t important because they don’t ship and take programmers away from writing more features or a new produce (well, that’s my less than 140 version of his stance on spending time doing unit tests). Rob Conery, a former Microsoft employee that also write articles about software development wrote an article about how Joel is hurting the industry and needs to shut up. Below is my response that I left in Rob’s blog. Rob even responded!
I’m an apologist . . . I admire both of them. As a debater I can take either side!
But Jim said something that stuck with me and that is we need people on the far left and the far right of issues so that we can pull the reasonable people toward the middle and reach a consensus. If there are no crazy people on the left then you end up with solutions that lean right!
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I read “duct tape programmers” and came away thinking Joel was putting down programmers who used the duct tape method of getting things done even though that’s exactly the opposite of what was there. Maybe that’s because I’ve read all these articles from him about how important the craft is and how writing maintainable code is so important and blah blah blah. And now Zawinski is a hero for not caring about any of that?!?
I think the point of the article is that a) anyone who cares about what they do wants to do things the “right” way and b) doing it the right way gets in the way of shipping. Strive for the golden mean!
Oh yeah, lets not forget about the secret that the “right” way isn’t defined and never will be because things change so much and once we figure out the right way someone is going to come along with something cooler, faster, easier. Damn you Ruby! Damn you Python! And of course, damn you C# . . . you are so much safer than C but C is the right way . . . it’s the only way . . . and Joel said if I don’t know C I am useless!
Sheldon
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