In response to first Joel’s and then Uncle Bob’s recent blog posts, Mark Needham summarised the “Duct-Tape Programmer debate” from a balanced viewpoint, which is a rare and valuable thing amongst the mud slinging in the comments of both Joel’s and Bob’s articles.
I felt similar to Mark when I read Joel’s article; but it wasn’t the message* that concerned me so much as its delivery: If I had read the same thing on a mailing list or forum I would have immediately discarded it as blatant trolling. The language and tone was offensive inflammatory at best, and disgusting at worst. I don’t have delicate sensibilities, I just think that kind of language on a well respected blog is unsavoury. YMMV.
Like Mark, I also spent a bit of time today mulling over both sides of the argument and came to the conclusion that driving my code and architecture through tests, keeping my code base clean and caring enough about the long-term benefits of doing these things gives me more joy as a professional than the roller-coaster highs and lows of crazy hack-ship-fix-rinse-repeat cycles.
Maybe the VC demons and company bosses get a warm fuzzy feeling to beat their competitors to market initially, when the champagne corks are still popping. I’m not in it for them and I’m pretty sure the customers suffer in the short term, first with bugs that could have been avoided with unit tests and then in the long term when their shiny new product becomes an unmaintainable ball of mud that really could do with a rewrite six months down the track.
In the end I think it’s a question of programmers being honest with themselves and sticking to their personal, moral values and judgement. If you’re able to create and maintain quality, at a sustainable pace, without writing tests, then you deserve all the kudos, cash and fame of a rock-star-duct-tape programmer. The rest of us still need to sleep at night: That’s what craftsmanship, clean-code and TDD does for me.
- I prefer to think that Joel was primarily railing against the ivory-tower architect and BDUF waste, rather than /praising/ the duct-tape programmer for making a mess. I hear that loud and clear; any kind of clean-code “trick” can be used for evil as well as good.
(I changed my mind on some of the adjectives originally used to describe the language of Joel’s post. I think it’s about right now.)
