An elderly gentleman being, one evening, in the company of some persons
who were much amused at the witty sayings of a child , said to some one near him, that witty children usually made stupid men. The child heard him and said to him: “Sir, you were very witty, no doubt when you were young.”
Don’t understand NAMBLA…
You know it’s weird. Back in college I had some bright professor guy spend an entire semester teaching us how to mathematically prove the validity of our algorithms using First Order Predicate Calculus.
I’ve yet to encounter that anywhere else in my career.
If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging – Will Rogers
Jeff – to me, these last couple of posts appear you’re letting your ego argue for you. First you present a Ferengi strawman, and now a false dichotomy.
Sure, a minority of us developers actively pursue improving our craft. Sure, a lead or manager can attempt to force a methodology onto her team, and fail miserably.
But this ignores why a lot of fundamental change in our industry actually happens.
Change in software development comes from the trenches, and it uses the same mechanism that caused my Arthur loving little girl grow into an emo teenager. Peer pressure.
There was the geeky few who toyed around with C++ in a C world – they sneezed on some others who caught the bug – eventually the entire industry got sick ;). Then there were other geeks toyed around with Java in a C++ world, sneezing on their peers. Similarly, it was geeks who gave iterative programming a shot in a waterfall world.
And now there are some of us who’ve felt a bit of the SOLID bug coming on. We hope it’s contagious.
Personally I would have reversed Yagni Nambla.
Dunno if you’ve seen this one or not:
http://lost-theory.org/realultimatepower/
It’s nice to see other people coming around to the fact that most of Jeff’s posts are simply noise generators; his dogmatic statements don’t do much for me, but at the very best his posts are good for starting conversations, both in the virtual world and the real one.
The divisive us and them mentality attracts a lot of people, but at the end of the day causes more problems than it is worth. I prefer Scott Hanselman’s measured, humble approach to things, he doesn’t make people feel stupid.
Stack Overflow is actually useful though.
Philip, I agree with what you are saying and it is interesting because a few people (including myself) mentioned the paper titled Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments in one of Jeff’s posts from last year: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001160.html
Maybe Jeff would do well to read it, I know it humbled me quite a bit.
@dan
It’s a link to a Youtube video of the Daily Show, not horse porn. And besides, do you normally blindly open every link you see?
Maybe the W3C should remove the a tag from the next version of the HTML spec, heaven forbid someone might get offended about something on the internet.
you should have put an NSFW warning for your non-American readers.
Well then you can’t go on complaining about how this site is sending you to all sorts of lurid places, because you did that search entirely out of your own volition. (And what kind of browser takes two seconds to display a url in the statusbar?)
Also, if you’re so scared of everything, set up tinyurl to do previews. http://tinyurl.com/preview.php?enable=1
Your sort of whining is nearly as bad as those Christian groups that claim to be offended by the fact that Penthouse contains nudity.
Jeff,
I like your blog for the most part and think it’s been fun. It’s great you’ve been able to turn your blogging into a great startup. Good work there.
But I’ve removed Coding Horror from my RSS reader. My basic problem is that you seem to have nothing new to add yet continue to write once a week. Since you don’t have new content, you end up saying the same things over and over in more inflammatory ways. I agree with this post, for instance, but I want to argue with you about it because of the aggressive way you assert your point. (In essence, I feel you fail to adhere to DRY. 
I don’t mind trying different ways to make your points entertaining and so on, but I do mind having my time wasted. By necessity a regurgitation needs to look different in order to be entertaining. That’s why flashback episodes of sitcoms always have a bit of new material to set the show up. But at the end, when you see how little new stuff was in the show, you still feel cheated.
Basically, this blog has become a time sink for me and I need to cut it out of my life. (It’s not you it’s me and all that.)
I think there’s value in reading what someone’s ideal design principles are, but one of the best things about being a human is our ability to act in a manner that best fits a situation without tying ourselves directly to rules and principles. Any time we say YOU MUST DO THINGS THIS WAY, sure, it imposes some structure, but it also limits our ability to try new things that may solve our problems in a new and superior way.