Duct Tape Developers? I'm done with this guy
Posted by Phillip Jackson in Coding, Craftsmanship, Duct Tape Developer, Joel Spolsky on 23 October 2009
“…but it seems to me like a lot of the Object Oriented Design principles you're hearing lately from people like Robert Martin and Kent Beck and so forth have gone off the deep end into architecture for architecture's sake. It doesn't seem like you could actually get any code written if you're spending all your time writing 8,000,000 unit tests, and every single dinky little class that you need to split a URL into four parts becomes an engineering project worthy of making a bridge, where you spend six months defining 1000 little interfaces. They've just gone off the deep end, and I don't think these people write very much code if they're coming up with these principles, to be honest, it doesn't even make sense.”
“One of the SOLID principles, and I'm totally butchering this, but…”
Yes Joel you are, let’s just stop there before I put that butcher knife to better use.
Joel has given up on what Brian Rigsby calls ‘the pursuit of unattainable perfection.’ If you aren’t pursuing perfection then, at *best*, you are sliding down into mediocrity. And honestly I think he gave up when he was Program Manager for the Excel team and his VBA garbage.
I think it’s safe to say this man’s creek is getting foggier by the day. As someone that has packed his own parachute before I would like to think he has an appreciation for a job done well. I mean we all assume EMTs know what they are doing… right:
Yes that duct tape went on faster than a gauze dressing, and I’m sure it’s getting the job done, though I can’t figure out what that job is without asking the person that put it on. More importantly I pity the guy that has to make a change to it. Our clients are assuming that we are also doing it right, and to not do it right, regardless of your excuse, is to invalidate that trust. If writing software well takes too long, then keep practicing until it doesn't.