Joel, duct tape is just one of the tools we have.
I used to really like what you write ‘on software’ – now I start really hating it. But that is more useful, because you always get me to think.
The guy with the duct tape – I would hate his guts if he was on my team.1 The little stunt with prev and next pointers of a linked list rolled into 32bits using XOR – nice. But very immature. If that guy goes missing, you can basically scrap his code and start again. That is not very much better than using multiple inheritance2 and multithreaded COM.
You are missing a point. The point is not to deliver software, at least not only, but to deliver working software. There are really just two possible outcomes: Either the thing you’re creating works half-way, or it doesn’t.3 If it works half-way, you (or someone else) will have to work on it for the whole of its lifetime (ambiguity intended). And the customer doesn’t want old bugs cropping up again and again. And he wont listen to you if you talk about duct tape. He doesn’t care.
Duct tape is just one of the tools we have. And as such, it needs to be applied where appropriate. Anyone claiming one tool to be vastly better than all the others is just wrong, whatever the tool. Your smart boy should learn to write code that others can read and maintain. Then he’s got a real future in software development.
I think that every talented programmer starts out as duct-tape guy. And then some of the things he tapes together come crashing down on him (or on the customer). And then he learns. But the dichotomy you’re proposing is wrong, its not either duct-tape or over-engineering. IMHO, there is a lot of middle ground. Just as an example (one is enough) – TDD/BDD practice is to ‘do the simplest thing that can possibly work’. This one sentence has saved me years of mental effort that would ultimately have been invisible to the customer.
The real work is to write working software. Over-engineering and building a second system is just (busy-work) work evasion. But the duct tape approach is evading work as well, by being lazy in the sort of way clever people are.
What I’ve been wondering. Are you doing Jamie Zawinski any kind of justice with your article?
1 ‘Hate his guts’ is just more colorful than ‘take issues with’ – No, I wouldn’t hate anyones guts. That is very rare.
2 I guess that is just a typo.
3 About one third of IT projects get cancelled before completing. The other two thirds sometimes overrun their budget by as much as twice the original estimate. (ie: ‘The Standish Group Report’, The Standish Group, 1995. pdf) We can’t pretend this isn’t happening and we need to feel responsible for the state of the industry.
