h1ghlevelb1ts

Dreaming in code

I just finished reading Dreaming in code and I only can recommend it to everyone. It is rare to find a book about software development which combines captivating story telling with sound technical knowledge. Scott Rosenberg tells the story of Chandler - the wannabe killer app by the Open Source Applications Foundation - while exploring topics like Mythical Man-Month, Turing Test, Halting Problem, 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' and many many more. But above all Dreaming in code managed to draw my attention to Joel Splosky's Blog - Joel on software.

Joel's blog offers a wide range of essays covering various aspects of software development, eg Big Macs vs. the Naked Chef which talks about the danger of methodologies:

What's the moral of the story? Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them. It's pretty obvious to me that a talented chef is not going to be happy making burgers at McDonald's, precisely because of McDonald's rules.

This expresses so much how I feel about methodologies at the moment and goes hand in hand with another of Joel's essays - The law of leaky abstractions whose main point is that in spite of more and more abstractions we develop it is becoming harder and harder to be a proficient programmer, because at some stage any abstraction will break and you are forced to understand the underlying layer.

The bottom for me - good programmers are rare, but they are the ones which will make a project a success with or without methodologies.

So long,
Hardy

Old comments

2007-04-27Fredrik Rubensson
Wow - dreaming in code - it sums up the way it feels when something cool is being shaped into being. The code just hangs around you all the time... Definitley have to read that book.

Have seen pointers to Joel for a while but never managed to get there myself. I guess I have to now... It is really wise to beware of methodologies - they screw things up and gets in the way mostly. Sometimes they can at the most manage to get a project from disaster to mediocracy but they never play a part in creating something astonishing. Even less -something really beautiful.