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The Duct Tape Programmer

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#61

Post by pavelludiq »

SapphireSun wrote: post #40
pavelludiq wrote: post #21

Duct tape is a great metaphor. Duct tape was one of my favorite toys as a child. My dad was always mad at me for wasting it. But i can't help it if i want to build a tower from straws and duct tape, a tool thats as flexible as duct tape is empowering for a 10 year old. I propose duct tape become the new hacker symbol! :D

;-) I think many other engineering disciplines would be upset if we took it all for ourselves - especially mechanical engineers.

Im sure that many of us will agree that hacking is not limited to software.

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#62

Post by Tichy »

azanar wrote: post #60
tjogin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why didn't he get a motorized pump before the alarming need for it arose? Because, at the time, that money was better spent on other things that were more necessary then.

So why didn't he get a motorized pump before the alarming need for it arose? Because, at the time, that money was better spent on other things that were necessary at the time. Might have been better spent. Might have . Say that it was better spent is just begging the question. That he didn't get the pump can be blamed as much on poor risk mitigation as it can be on avoiding unnecessary expenses. Having a cavalier and…

Fair point with the motor pump, but it seems to me that we end up on square one: it might have been better to get the pump in advance, or it might not have been better. It all depends. With the motor pump example it sounds like a no-brainer, but even there it depends. If you have a very small boat, heaving a motor pump on board might actually sink the ship.

There are all sorts of risks, and it isn't obvious when it is worthwhile to get insurance and when it isn't. One risk is never launching.

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#63

Post by Tichy »

akeefer wrote: post #58
Tichy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'd kill for a decent test suite and fully-automated deployment. Kill!" Then why don't you write one? I suspect you don't have the time - well back then when you created the system, you did not have the time either. So the bottom line again seems to be: it is not actually THAT important. Otherwise you would make the time.

That's a bad conclusion to make: it's the classic tradeoff between importance and urgency. If you only ever do the urgent stuff, the hair-on-fire-has-to-be-done-yesterday stuff, you'll never make time to get to long-term strategic projects. The payoff for something like unit testing, automated deployment, and continuous integration are over the very, very long haul. If your cost/benefit analysis is always looking at…

Still, in 3 years the company might already be bankrupt, and nobody would care about tests anymore. Bankrupt is maybe too extreme, but the particular code module you spent 3 months writing tests for might be replaced by some open source solution or just not being needed anymore.

I kind of see your point, but I find it difficult to deduce a binding rule from all of this. Sometimes it is important to have tests, sometimes other things are more important. You still have to decide on an individual basis.

Thing is, the TDD and technical debt evangelists are typically consultants. Consultants usually earn more money the longer a project takes, and their income is not tied to the yields of the project. Just something to take into consideration imo.

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#64

Post by abalashov »

Tichy wrote: post #25
tdavis wrote: post #23

You know, it is a great book and I love Jamie's interview and the "duct tape" style was used well at Netscape, but just because the guy doesn't writing unit tests or use higher-level abstractions doesn't automatically make him better than other types. Some of the smartest programmers I've met have been religious about TDD and strict formatting and commenting and as a result maintain and work on some incredibly large…

"I'd kill for a decent test suite and fully-automated deployment. Kill!" Then why don't you write one? I suspect you don't have the time - well back then when you created the system, you did not have the time either. So the bottom line again seems to be: it is not actually THAT important. Otherwise you would make the time.

it is not actually THAT important. Otherwise you would make the time.

... that's just a little presumptuous, with respect to the concrete facts and motivations involved...

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#65

Post by fauigerzigerk »

akeefer wrote: post #58
Tichy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'd kill for a decent test suite and fully-automated deployment. Kill!" Then why don't you write one? I suspect you don't have the time - well back then when you created the system, you did not have the time either. So the bottom line again seems to be: it is not actually THAT important. Otherwise you would make the time.

That's a bad conclusion to make: it's the classic tradeoff between importance and urgency. If you only ever do the urgent stuff, the hair-on-fire-has-to-be-done-yesterday stuff, you'll never make time to get to long-term strategic projects. The payoff for something like unit testing, automated deployment, and continuous integration are over the very, very long haul. If your cost/benefit analysis is always looking at…

The difficulty is that you always know what's urgent but you cannot be so sure about what has longer term importance.

In the case of unit testing, though, long term is short term enough for me to recognise it as urgent.

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#66

Post by cubicle67 »

swilliams wrote: post #26
KevinMS wrote: post #13

"One principle duct tape programmers understand well is that any kind of coding technique that’s even slightly complicated is going to doom your project." Like writing a custom compiler for your web app? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html After he jumped that shark I don't read anything he writes anymore.

"After he jumped that shark I don't read anything he writes anymore." ...how'd you get that quote then? Or did you only read enough to get something to complain about?

He wrote a multi-threaded C++ app to parse the html and return a random sentence?

Rhetorical question; What percentage of an article need to be read for the article as a whole to be classified as having been read?

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#67

Post by rimantas »

rbranson wrote: post #22
Triston wrote: post #16

I call bullshit. I've worked with some "just get it done programmers'. Have you tried to go into code that someone threw in to just make it work. Abstraction, interfaces and unit tests are not a leisurely activity for academic developers. We use them to make the code less complex and maintain. The cost of development isn't the initial code base, its the fixes and additional features people want AFTER the initial rele…

I don't think that's the point Joel is making. At the end of the article, it really comes together. Perhaps you are too heavily focused on the specifics (unit testing, etc) instead of the overall theme. He's basically saying that while the other guys are wasting time overengineering a project, sometimes just getting to work and getting started is a much more productive approach. Joel isn't directly bad-mouthing unit…

And the guys who will have to maintain that promptly shipped code will say a lot of "wtf?" and waste 10x more time on it.

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#68

Post by eugenejen »

Virax wrote: post #35

Jamie Zawinski is not "hard at work building the future". According to his own website, he is managing the DNA lounge, and the last thing of any substance he worked on was a program to delete silence from mp3 streams (see http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/archiver/ ). He claims a copyright date of 2001-2006 for this program, which, after a quick skim, appears to be high quality. In my opinion, he is a talented p…

Jamie also worked under Peter Norvig, and this is what Peter said about Jamie:

". One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub. "

-- from http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#69

Post by fauigerzigerk »

sbt wrote: post #53
gruseom wrote: post #28

It's nice to see Spolsky get this enthusiastic about something other than his marketing, and I'm sure Peter Seibel agrees. But he negates his entire point at the end. After going on about how great duct tape programmers are, he says, don't think that means you can be one, because they're magic. (He says "pretty", but in this case pretty means magic.) To wit: Duct tape programmers have to have a lot of talent to pull…

Agreed. I wasn't really sure what I had just read. One thing I feel fairly certain about though is that these duct-tape people will screw up a project in the long run.

I think duct-tape programmer is not a very well defined concept. People who are careless and sloppy are the ones who will wreck a project. Duct-tape sounds too sloppy to me as well, but it could also be a metaphor for being pragmatic and keeping it simple.

Re: The Duct Tape Programmer

#70

Post by BerislavLopac »

"We’ve got to go from zero to done in six weeks"

This is my personal pet peeve. There is the iron triangle at work again, and when one of its points is fixed you still have two others to adjust, which seems to be forgotten here. Zawinski is trying to keep the scope (i.e. what defines the "done") and is sacrificing quality; he should instead try to make his life easier by reducing both a little bit rather than cutting just one to the bone.

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