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Outstanding Objects (Developed Dirt Cheap)
Mark Leighton Fisher writes "Some readers might be interested in
Outstanding Objects (Developed Dirt Cheap); or "Why Don't Developers Search the Literature?" It seems like I still see a lot of wheel reinvention going on, even with the wealth of code and information now available on the Net."
Contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, I really do think that software engineering is different from software craftsmanship. Although you can take many of the things said about software engineering and come up with an application of them similar to an application you could come up with for software craftsmanship, but in practice you wouldn't. This is because the underlying philosophies are very different, and they exist for different purposes. The philosophies/purposes break down like this:
Software Engineering: make the development of software a controllable business process.
Software Craftsmanship: make the best software.
The basic notion of software engineering is to create a *process* which is so perfect that no personal weaknesses in your programmers can hurt the company. A subtle side effect of this is that it also tends to prevent any extremely great individual contribution from having a large impact. That is, the goal is to make all of your coders cogs in a machine. The business owners and managers would much rather have this setup because it makes it easier for them to sleep at night.