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Software Engineering Has Its Own Political Axis From Conservative To Liberal
An anonymous reader writes "Steve Yegge is back at it again. This essay is on the notion that software engineers range from conservative to liberal in their notion of software and how it should be built. He says, 'Just as in real-world politics, software conservatism and liberalism are radically different world views. Make no mistake: they are at odds. They have opposing value systems, priorities, core beliefs and motivations. These value systems clash at design time, at implementation time, at diagnostic time, at recovery time. They get along like green eggs and ham. I think it is important for us to recognize and understand the conservative/liberal distinction in our industry. It probably won't help us agree on anything, pretty much by definition. Any particular issue only makes it onto the political axis if there is a fundamental, irreconcilable difference of opinion about it. Programmers probably won't — or maybe even can't — change their core value systems. But the political-axis framework gives us a familiar set of ideas and terms for identifying areas of fundamental disagreement. This can lead to faster problem resolution.'"
...who the fuck he is.
Note to Sales Department: I get that this is Yegge's slashvertisement ("anonymous reader writes..." sh'yeah, right...) but you still need the editors to set it up better than this if you want those click-throughs.
/. has hit rock bottom.
(for the record, this left/right, liberal/conservative, tweedledum/tweedledee polarization is bullshit. When you actually talk to people, you find a range of viewpoints. Know any concealed weapon carrying liberal democrats? I do. How about social conservative republicans who buy contraceptives? Yep. Or even worse, programmers who use the Visual Studio C# .NET WPF paradigm at work, and then use a Linux desktop coding open source at home. Probably so.)
Because, you know, there are like only two ways to code: Liberal and Conservative. There certainly can't be a THIRD way like Funny or Informative or Surprise and Fear. Damn! Or Ruthless Efficiency!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
If you're getting paid for your software, there's one set of priorities. If you're doing it for your own satisfaction, there's quite another. Not understanding or being able to separate business from the actual activity of writing software seems to be the problem.
I see this on a daily basis where I work. Younger software developers seem to think that "cool" and "new" is a good reason to do things - which it is, as long as it doesn't get in the way of making money. When there's a client involved and significant money, "cool" and "new" are only good if they actually help sell and maintain the software. The client doesn't care about frameworks, or ruby, or agile or lambda expressions. They care about cost, reliability and usability. Change for its own sake, or to gratify only the programmer is frequently a problem.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Dear anonymous entity, stop projecting the opinions of one blogger onto a diverse population of over 300 million.
No, he doesn't. He uses "conservative" in the sense of risk averse and "liberal" in the sense of not conservative. He then defines a number of traits which help define whether you are a programming liberal or conservative. For instance, if you like strong and/or static typing (he conflates the two), you are conservative. If you like dynamic/weak typing, you are liberal.
There are several other traits by which you can measure your conservatism/liberalism in programming terms. That exposes the flaw in the paradigm: just like in politics most people are not across the board conservative or across the board liberal. I, for example, would be labelled liberal in terms of the typing issue but conservative is respect of several of his other points - like database normalisation.
Another problem I have with his idea is his choice of terms. For many people, me included, the political label "conservative" has strong associations with US far right politicians, who, from my perspective in the UK, are all mad as a box of frogs. He spends a lot of time at the end of the article arguing that being software conservative is not bad in the way that the political equivalent is bad, but I think he would have done better to have chosen less pejorative terminology.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
He's right that there are opposing ideologies, but Liberal/Conservative just muddies the water.
Utopian believes:
1) Zero defects is achievable and support processes should assume that will be the case after release.
2) "Good code" is the result of using an "industry standard" language.
3) That full functionality specifications can be collected during design from the people who will be using the system.
4) Achieving 1-3 is more important than delivering the functionality requested by the users.
5) Considers that the delivered project will be "complete" and further modifications will be minimal.
Pragmatist believes:
1) That defects are inevitable and support processes need to allow for easy/quick recovery.
2) "Good code" should be inherently understandable by the majority of those who will be making changes to it.
3) That human memory is spotty and nobody is able to tell you 100% of what they know.
4) Delivering software that meets the needs of the user is more important than perfection of the code or processes.
5) Understands that the world changes and the software needs to make those changes easy.
As you can guess - I'm a pragmatist.
Because there is a subset of people who can't function without a 'them vs us' mentality.
I prefer the sporting metaphor in business organization. I'd rather work for a mountain climber than a baseball player. Mountain climbers' primary concern is to make it to the top (achieve a goal). Beating someone else's time or performance is secondary. And there is no thought of kicking the competition off the route or removing their protection.
The conflict driven personality often performs miserably once they have 'won' a competition, having no drive or motivation to improve if there is no 'enemy' left against which they can measure themselves.
Have gnu, will travel.