[LRUG] Software Craftsmanship

[James Adam]

While this is a lovely conversation, I'm not sure what the point is.

Firstly, who has disagreed with the notion of "Software  
Craftsmanship", and what are their actual objections?

Secondly, why is it even meaningful to discuss whether or not it  
exists? Anything can be a craft, or a mechanical chore. Painting can  
be the result of a tortured artist pouring their heart out onto a  
canvas, or paint-by-numbers. The results may not be easy to discern  
from each other, and equally effective both as functional artifacts  
and acts of expression.

Everything is a craft, and everything is work. Whether or not you  
consider yourself to be a craftsperson, an artist, an engineer, a  
scientist, or a romantic is largely meaningless to anyone except  
yourself.

I'm not sure to whom the existence of "craftsmanship" in programming  
is relevant.

It's unlikely to be the consumer of our work, because they only really  
care that it does the job it should; let's never forget that the  
majority of us are in the business of building tools that perform  
specific, reasonably-clearly-defined functions, which is unlike most  
art, whose purpose is rarely even defined.

IMHO, it's meaningless to talk about software craftsmanship as if  
there's some struggle to attribute that label. I see no army of  
thought-police looming to smash our beautiful abstractions and elegant  
algorithms, and nor do I see the populous clamoring to admire our  
refactorings and marvel at the poignancy of a particular subroutine.

There is beauty in programming, and that's hard to see for some  
people, but there is beauty in modern art that others struggle to  
fathom; art in the building of bridges; elegance in the mechanism of a  
drug; ... you get the idea. It's not like things are either  
engineering or a craft, but never both. I don't understand why some  
people feel that their creativity is under threat. Please elucidate me!