Caffeinated Coder

I’m deeply sorry.

The post you are about to read is mental masturbation in its purest form.

Its sole purpose is to release the mental tension that has been distracting me and otherwise preventing me from moving on to more productive lines of thought.

Yes, you guessed it. I am about to add yet another blog post to the already tedious list of reactions to Joel Spolsky’s now infamous Duct Tape Programmer Post.

So let’s skip the cerebral foreplay and jump straight in to my naked thoughts on the matter:

1. Did Joel really think that anyone would feel flattered by the Duct-Tape metaphor? – If you’re resourceful, then you might be able to use duct-tape get a car to the closest mechanic without the aid of a tow truck or keep pipes from flooding the house until the plumber gets there. If you’re McGuyver, you might even be able to fashion a bomb out of it. However, duct-tape is not typically a tool ascribed to artists or a material associated with fundamentally important work. Even Jamie Zawinski, the hero of the post, appears to have taken it for a back-handed compliment. Many of Joel’s ideological allies in the mini-flame wars that ensued also conceded that it was an unfortunate choice of words.
2. Is Netscape truly the ideal poster child for the ‘Just F__ing Ship It’ movement? I’ll concede that Netscape deserves a prominent place in history for its role in opening the web to the masses, but its long term track record for both quality and business success is problematic at best. Early versions of the browser were widely criticized for being excessively bug laden and the company eventually went bankrupt shortly after the failed rewrite debacle that ended up causing a three year lag-time between releases. Although there’s definitely room to debate exactly who was at fault for the spectacular failure, it seems to me like Netscape wasn’t the best choice to use as a centerpiece for this argument. Perhaps it would have been better to practice the Separation of Concerns principle, one of those crazy design fads that Joel rails about, and split apart the book review thread from the other tangled ball of themes in this post. Then he could have selected a more effective example to illustrate his point.
3. Does Joel really think multiple inheritance, templates, design patterns, and COM are good examples of the “fadish programming craziness” espoused by today’s architecture astronauts? – Perhaps he just forgot to insert “Imagine you were coding back in 1994” before he went off the latest installment of his architectural astronaut rant. Then again, perhaps it has been a little too long since he’s been on the developer end of things and its time that he stick with the marketing and managerial topics that he have become his staple in recent years.
4. Does he really not see the conflict of interest in starting a “shipping over quality” crusade while at the same time selling bug tracking software – At the risk of falling victim to a circumstantial ad-hominen, Joel arguing against Test-Driven Development is a little like the proprietor of a fat person’s clothing store attacking the medical establishment for advocating diet and exercise as a way to lose weight. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been the recipient of quite so many pithy twitter jabs if he spent more time over the last few years focusing on substantive topics and less time pimping FogBugz on his blog.
5. Why the “pretty boy” disclaimer? – This was the most confusing aspect of his post for me. It felt vaguely reminiscent of an old grade school “then I woke up” ending that I used to tack on to stories when I was just too afraid to to commit to their fundamental premise. Was he backpedalling because he realized that extolling “shipping above all else” as a heroic virtue was a fundamentally flawed premise when applied to the software industry at large? Perhaps he was trying to compensate for his unfortunate choice of the duct-tape analogy and reassure Jamie that he wasn’t actually making him the butt of a subtle joke. Then again, perhaps it was just a poor choice for an ending that served only to water down an already questionable piece of writing.

Ah. So much better…

The morning after

So…Um…Joel…AWKWARD…I guess that was pretty harsh in hindsight.

Did I mention that your original book is still among my favorites and that I would probably ask you to autograph on some decidedly non-phallic-looking peripheral device if we ever met in person?

Unfortunately, I still think that your post pretty much sucked. Sorry.

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