[LRUG] Your Code is My Hell

[Paul Robinson]

On 4 Sep 2011, at 12:32, Anthony Green wrote:

> My issue with the Zen arguement is that it's far too often a facade for having no discipline rather that having a or many discipline(s). I feel much happier with Alistair Cockburn's advice relating to Shuhari and adopting a multidisciplary approach.††


You should never read too much into a metaphor or analogy (especially when I'm the one wielding it clumsily above my head), but the point I was trying to make was that there is no "perfect way" to write Ruby beyond something that instinctively you get a sense for. It's unusual in that regard.

I have a real problem for telling somebody "what you've done here is wrong" unless it is semantically or syntactically incorrect, or produces an incomplete or incorrect result. I prefer saying "here's another way to do it, what do you think about it?".

In the original article you posted you complained there wasn't enough "discipline" going on any more.

But I'd argue discipline and dogma doesn't work when making better programmers, or at least not in the way I interpreted as you meaning. Better programmers ponder what code to write before writing it, and then ponder it some more after writing it. They learn to think. They learn to challenge their own assumptions and those of others, and use the tools of TDD, BDD, Agile workflows and Kanban to give them that freedom in the constraints of a multi-person team with budgetary and schedule constraints. 

That doesn't mean there isn't a problem with a lot of developers. The problem is they're confusing the freedom to ponder with the freedom to not bother thinking at all if they don't want to - or more importantly, don't know how to.

When interviewing these days, I ask coders to do the Ruby Koans if they haven't already. They don't have to do all of them, just a bunch of them. I then ask them what they learned or thought. You can find out a lot about a programmer's attitude by that one exercise. On one occasion I found out somebody didn't know how to actually code, but rather just googled for code snippets!

Anyway, there are no hardened answers. I think we all want better coders out there, I just don't like the idea there is a single way to achieve that or that we need to replace one set of flawed dogma (which you describe) with another set of dogma which alienates other approaches and doesn't - in my opinion - allow for self-discovery and for more creative coding.