Analogy Mismatch
I was sent this this morning:
http://zedshaw.com/essays/master_and_expert.html
It’s been chewing at me all day. I don’t know that I agree with this.
I think the analogy is wrong in part. In the analogy, the master is in control of what he knows and practices. But I still say that he needs to check his form as he practices to make sure bad form doesn’t become habit. This is analogous to ‘unit-testing’ himself, not the extraneous movement during performance of a young learner. His code, will always and forever be his own. He need not protect himself from other’s modifications of his form, only his own degradation. But even here unit testing is required.
Comparing the young learners unit test writing to the final performance is not a valid pairing. Unit tests are written when practicing and rehearsing. (Note: practicing is writing code at home, and rehearsing is writing code at work) The final performance, the operation of the code in production, doesn’t involve unit tests. The creation of code involves unit tests. You can’t compare the creation of unit tests during the writing of code to the extraneous operations in a young learner’s final performance. Those aren’t the same thing.
I fear his point is muddled in his own head. The practice of a martial art is analogous to the programmer writing code. The performance of the martial-art in competition (the result of practice, refinement and quality checking) is analogous to the performance of the code in production (the result of writing code, refactoring and unit testing).
He is comparing unequal things, and therefore invalidates his argument. His point is, I assume, that a master accomplishes a task (victory in combat, or automation of a business task) with the least effort possible, but the details are mismatched.
In software we make analogies for –everything-. Most times because we have to. People we are explaining things to won’t understand the context of the deeply technical or specialized things we are describing so we create an analogy to something they do have context in. But we need to be careful that our analogies are valid and we are comparing two equal things.