26 May
2004
26 May
'04
1:15 p.m.
I remember a
very knowledgeable acquaintance of many years ago whose
business card read "Software Craftsperson".
Even in computing contexts,
many people would say that methodical and
consistent development work, i.e. the kind of thing someone familiar
with Knuth and who is a trained software engineer, is better than
something 'hacked together' by one guy at 4 in the morning. This is a very debatable topic, of course. But the
myth of the
'greatest software' coming out of hacking sessions is generally
rather dubious.
Well, there's some truth lurking in it; the greatest software usually
grows from a small seed, and that small seed is often the result of a
week of all-nighters or some such, and almost invariably the product of
a single mind.
Of course, that small seed is usually very much a hack job, the sort of
thing TNHD describes in the "Berkeley Quality Software" entry. (That's
the distinction between good and brilliant that I drew above.)
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