[thelist] Re: philosophical or possibly somewhat OT

Chris Marsh chris at ecleanuk.com
Mon Mar 24 09:03:00 CST 2003


Carol

[..]

> >> We all know coding by committee stinks -- or to put it positively, 
> >> the best code is always (in my long experience) written by an 
> >> individual
> > I'd have to disagree with this completely.
> > No major porgram can be completed by one person alone.
> Now it's very interesting to me that you can say that. In my 
> 25+ years as a documenter, I'd have to say ALL the good 
> programs I've documented were written by a gifted individual, 

I'm not trying to pick holes unnecessarily, but this probably doesn't
add up to very much software as a percentage of that produced over 25
years worldwide.

[..]

> The fact that you have never experienced the power of an 
> application written by a strong programmer indicates to me 
> either that you are young and quite inexperienced, or that we 
> (or those in whatever country you reside in) have lost a 
> capability rather important to our age. Do the rest of the 
> Web developers on this list also have this misperception, 
> that programming is essentially a team sport???

It's not a misperception in *this* century. Programming (IMHO) is not a
team sport like rugby, but is a team sport like pool [can be]. The
advent, development and subsequent standardisation of object oriented
techniques mean that you can have several gifted programmers working in
parallel instead of just one (or more) in serial. If this means that you
reduce your time to market by a factor of n, why would you possibly have
one guy do everything? It doesn't make any financial sense to throw your
competitive advantage down the pan just to indulge the ego of one very
gifted programmer. If you're even thinking of suggesting that the single
programmer could produce the end result quicker than a team of similarly
talented individuals you may simultaneously explain why a PIII 800MHz PC
will crunch numbers faster that a beawolf cluster of similarly specified
machines ;)

[..]

Regards

Chris Marsh

"Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily"    - Ockham's Razor



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