RE: ::scr Re: Cognitive Friction

["Simon Kinahan" <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 11:05:34AM -0000, Simon Kinahan said:
> > I've notice people have started to use the things obsessively,
> now they're
> > an accepted part of the software engineering world. There's a line of
> > reasoning that goes "my solution is in the patterns book, so it must be
> > right", that goes much like the "I have UML diagrams so it must be good"
> > that was around a few years ago.
>
> *cough*
>
> XP.

Hmm. Yes, I'm sure that too. Though I quite like XP, or at least a lot of
the stuff behind it. I'm sure people take the Rules and apply them without
understanding and just get a big pile of spaghetti, but a lot of the
material written while XP was being developed emphasised what I said in my
last post: that programming requires thought, and thought cannot be
automated, therefore you have to treat developers as professionals and trust
them to do their job. If you can't do that, you should a) fire them or b)
resign.

> I was working for the best programmer I know a while back and found a
> bunch of elegant code that I realised was a Singleton pattern [0] in an
> odd but beautiful place. When I quizzed him about it he had no idea that
> that was it just seemed like the logical thing to do. Of course there
> were other bits of his code that were hairy - he was agifted C
> programmer working with Java so obviously he'd reimplemented pointer
> artithmetic in Java. With added OO sugaring. Which hurt my brain.

Thats the good thing about Gamma's original patterns: they were things
people were doing anyway. I worry about some of them though: the need for
Singleton and Factory in particular seems to indicate the set of constructs
in OO languages could be richer.

> I worry about the fact that there's a whole swathe of programmers coming
> through that will have gone through the university system doing
> programming because of the dot.com/numeeja thing and their courses are
> geared towards that - from some courses I've seen it is *just* cargo
> cult programming.

I think there've always been a lot of these people. Back before the Web
became a big commercial deal, they were VB, Gupta and Powerbuilder
programmers. Companies seem to divide strictly into ones full of cargo-cult
types, and ones with good people. You do find good people in cargo cult
companies, but very rarely the other way around. Fortunately its quite easy
to tell the difference in an interview situation.

Simon