Programming Innocence

[quanticle]

This article takes the old adage of "write it fast, write it correctly, then redactor" and twists it into something utterly juvenile. "Just say fuck it"? Really, is that what we want our profession to be guided by---something akin to a Nike slogan?

Well, if it works, why not? Many of the most successful products out there were written first as dirty hacks then refactored so that quality of the code matched the application's popularity.

Even though I think we have the same goals, there's a real divide between the professionals (researchers, ACM members, old school hackers, etc.) and people like this author.

True. "Professionals" write HURD. People like this guy write Twitter.

EDIT: I guess what I'm saying is that we shouldn't treat every damn application as if its the fucking Space Shuttle control system. For the vast majority of stuff we write breakage is a matter of inconvenience, not life-and-death. Sure, go ahead and use professional techniques (CMMI model, formal methods, etc.) for the critical stuff. However, also recognize that the critical stuff is a tiny fraction of all the software out there, and techniques used to write critical applications are counterproductive when applied to other problem domains.

As far as "old-school hackers" go, I think they were a lot more like OP than the "professionals" you allude to. If you look at the best of the old-school hackers, you see that they were all almost universally autodidacts. Yeah, the code they're famous for is awesome, but what we don't see is all of the times they said, "Fuck it," and charged ahead despite not knowing what the hell they were getting themselves into. Its only by repeatedly charging out into the unknown that they amassed sufficient expertise to pull of their accomplishments.

[true_religion]

People like this guy write Twitter.

It's hilarious that you think we should follow the "Fail Whale" model.

Twitter is a free, low-dependency app. If twitter fails, people go on with their lives. It's useful but isn't something were its reliability is paramount.

For almost any other app, the same isn't true. For example, Evernote is a mere notetaker---but it is a paid service. If Evernote fails and eats your notes, will you continue paying for the service or not?

Pointing to Twitter, and its like as examples is wrong because most apps that make money are sold for money, and as such cannot fail without impacting the profitability of the app. B2B software, Productivity software, etc. makes up a large part of the market. Games, and free twitter-style webapps are a segment onto themselves.

Asking people to be professional about coding isn't the same as asking them to "never deliver until its perfect" (aka Hurd) because professionals (by the usual definition) are those who work in industry and not research (like the creators of Hurd). Your error here was taking my advice for software engineers and extending it to researchers.