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The Parable of the Two Programmers (1985)

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Re: The Parable of the Two Programmers (1985)

#31

Post by raldi »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #23

Oh god, this thing's actually getting traction here. Look, there's no moral to this story and very little to glean from it because it's about a situation that's ridiculous on its face. It's written to appeal to cowboy programmers to make them feel better about their prejudices in software development. Can any of you actually relate a real-world case where a 4-month-long team-driven effort produced some code to solve…

Yes. I worked at a company that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, and nearly a year, on a server monitoring system that never acheived a high enough timeseries resolution to actually solve the problem it was funded for. Then a 20-year veteran of the company stepped in and wrote a 50-line shell script, pushed it to the relevant machines, plugged it into the timeseries database, and solved the problem. He called it his 89¢ solution.

Re: The Parable of the Two Programmers (1985)

#33

Post by swatow »

jebediah wrote: post #4

Wow, as someone who is going to start doing Computer Science next year, I had already heard that most of programming is about thinking, but had no idea that is was to the point of 5 lines of code per day being exceptional.

No, this is just an extreme example of the "don't try to be a smart guy" ideology. In practice 100-500 LOC per day is normal.

Re: The Parable of the Two Programmers (1985)

#34

Post by akamaka »

I've lived this experience, many times over, and the story is true at it's core.

Some folks might dismiss this as a fantasy scenario, and sure, it's missing a lot of details. In the real world, the lone programmer doesn't get to write an efficient program for different reasons: the software design is locked down by managers, there is fear of abandoning the poorly written legacy code, newer programming tools aren't allowed because most developers don't know them, or there is a sunk cost of an expensive software license that has already been purchased.

The story is symbolic, but the lessons are universally true, even today. For managers: conventional methods of judging productivity are unreliable. For developers: few organizations will enable you to work optimally.

Re: The Parable of the Two Programmers (1985)

#35

Post by anaolykarpov »

There was a MOOC on Coursera called "Irrational Behaviour" and one of the stories there is about a locksmith who in the beginning of his career used to fix a door lock in more than an hour, with lots of effort and almost always destroying the door. His clients were happy to pay him the 70 dollars he charged for the operation and also tipped him most of the time. As time went by and his experience increased he got to a point where he was fixing the door locks in 10 or 15 minutes with virtually no disturbances for the customers. His tips started to fade off and his customers became outraged at his 70$ charged for those 10 mins of work.

Conclusion: we don't want to pay related to the value we receive for a certain service, but to the amount of effort involved in the delivery of that service.

Re: The Parable of the Two Programmers (1985)

#36

Post by thaumaturgy »

raldi wrote: post #31
thaumaturgy wrote: post #23

Oh god, this thing's actually getting traction here. Look, there's no moral to this story and very little to glean from it because it's about a situation that's ridiculous on its face. It's written to appeal to cowboy programmers to make them feel better about their prejudices in software development. Can any of you actually relate a real-world case where a 4-month-long team-driven effort produced some code to solve…

Yes. I worked at a company that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, and nearly a year, on a server monitoring system that never acheived a high enough timeseries resolution to actually solve the problem it was funded for. Then a 20-year veteran of the company stepped in and wrote a 50-line shell script, pushed it to the relevant machines, plugged it into the timeseries database, and solved the problem. He called…

Eww. Were there extenuating factors though? The monitoring system was somebody's pet project, or was purchased under contract on the hopes and dreams of sales, or the monitoring software did work but not in that specific environment, or...?

Re: The Parable of the Two Programmers (1985)

#37

Post by NhanH »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #23

Oh god, this thing's actually getting traction here. Look, there's no moral to this story and very little to glean from it because it's about a situation that's ridiculous on its face. It's written to appeal to cowboy programmers to make them feel better about their prejudices in software development. Can any of you actually relate a real-world case where a 4-month-long team-driven effort produced some code to solve…

Yes, I can relate, and I just barely started my career in software development.

Let's have a thought experiment this way: imagine picking 4 programmers and ask them to implement Git from scratch, can you imagine any scenario in which they would take at least twice longer than Linus to produce the first working version? I certainly can.

Re: The Parable of the Two Programmers (1985)

#38

Post by elpachuco »

swatow wrote: post #33
jebediah wrote: post #4

Wow, as someone who is going to start doing Computer Science next year, I had already heard that most of programming is about thinking, but had no idea that is was to the point of 5 lines of code per day being exceptional.

No, this is just an extreme example of the "don't try to be a smart guy" ideology. In practice 100-500 LOC per day is normal.

100-500 LOC per day is normal.

It is not. You are not writing a novel here. Yes, most of the time is spent thinking. Some days there is no coding because it is spent on just trying to figure out what to do.

Re: The Parable of the Two Programmers (1985)

#40

Post by neilk »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #23

Oh god, this thing's actually getting traction here. Look, there's no moral to this story and very little to glean from it because it's about a situation that's ridiculous on its face. It's written to appeal to cowboy programmers to make them feel better about their prejudices in software development. Can any of you actually relate a real-world case where a 4-month-long team-driven effort produced some code to solve…

Yes, I did just that. Actually I would guess it was more like 2%.

This was the 90s, and the client was a big corporate programming consulting company. They wrote software for big corporations or the government. They couldn't get a website done internally.

The spec meeting was memorable, because they'd say "We want a form on the website that sends emails," and I'd say "Okay," and then they would look at each other, baffled. I realized later they expected pushback on every single item in the spec. We were just agreeing to everything without even thinking about it – their demands seemed modest to us.

So, we whipped up something that worked reasonably well with good old HTML and Perl, and even had some CMS-like features. It didn't take more than a few weeks.

I later met that internal team that was continuing to work on their ill-fated website project.

They were too elite to use something like Perl. They were working on a web server. From scratch. In C. They proudly showed me how their web server could serve a web page. They had even worked out how they could show a preformatted table of numbers, by printing it inside a textarea.

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