The Programmers Go Coding Two-by-Two — Hurrah?

theodp writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that pair programming is all the rage at tech darlings Facebook and Square. Its advocates speak in glowing terms of the power of pair programming, saying paired coders can catch costly software errors and are less likely to waste time surfing the Web. 'The communication becomes so deep that you don't even use words anymore,' says Facebook programmer Kent Beck. 'You just grunt and point.' Such reverent tones prompted Atlassian to poke a little fun at the practice with Spooning, an instructional video in which a burly engineer sits on a colleague's lap, wraps his arms around his partner's waist and types along with him hand over hand."

Comments

Re:Maybe this is a generational thing...

[ebh]

I've always maintained that programming should be thought of more as a trade then a profession. We were all apprentices at one time or another.

(I also haven't gotten religion on Agile. Who's the genius that thought a word representing a bunch of sweaty grunting guys pushing against each other in the mud, expending tons of energy and going nowhere was supposed to make me think of increased nimbleness and productivity?)

Re:XP again

[squiggleslash]

Reposted from years ago, my experience of Exxxxxxxxxxxxxxtreme programming!

The team was divided into pairs. One programmer programmed. The other's job was to look for mistakes, and then yell at the first for making the error. If the error was severe enough, he would announce it on the loudspeaker. What constituted an error was never clearly defined. Sometimes it was a logic error, or a typo, but other times it was allowing code to be too flexible and too open for future expansion, even when that was the best way to write something anyway. I got in trouble for writing a FOR loop with a named constant as one of the limits. "Named constants", it was explained to me, "mean you're looking at solving tomorrow's problems, not today's. Your code just needs to work for today. If the program can only support 100 simultaneous connections, write 100, not MAX_CONNECTIONS"