Comment by bguthrie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bguthrie | Hacker News Reader

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This article confused and dismayed me.

Since 2001, we've started in on the XP/Agile movement, which, think what you will of it, test-drives and version-controls relentlessly, and fosters a constant dialog about what quality is and how to achieve it.

Furthermore, some marvelous tools have been written in the last decade; I can hardly see how the author can complain about version-control systems, as Git and Mercurial--both miles better than what was available in 2001--are not least among them.

Other quality-enhancing things that have happened since 2001: continuous integration, build pipelines, Selenium and friends, behavior-driven development, REST architecture triumphant over the cathedral-like SOAP and XMLRPC, JSON over XML, lightweight messaging, the adoption of small, focused open-source tool over "quality-focused" large vendor bullshit-enterprise tools.

To the extent that UNIX sucks now, which it doesn't, it's because the hackers who work on it now have lagged the industry--not the other way around. So go find some other group of kids to shoo off your lawn.

You mean: "In 2001 we reinvented XP/Agile because we couldn't be bothered to read the old literature to see if somebody else had done something like that before" ?

I don't think that's quite fair on Fowler. C&B was published only 2 years before his book on XP, The Toyota Way was published in 2001 as well.

Really many of ideas which we've come to associate with "Agile"-like methods only really started to become codified about the end of the 1980's in more traditional manufacturing. I don't think it's too surprising that it's taken the software industry another 10 years for this stuff to become mainstream.

Also from your other comment above...

> Ever looked into how USA put a man on the moon ?

I'm sure FreeBSD would be a lot better if you gave it $25 billion USD over 11 years as well.

It takes more than just good will and intelligent people to produce high quality results.

I am afraid that the principles of Agile was clearly espoused by Tom Gilb in 1988, long before the Manifesto etc. He called it Evolutionary Programming but it is pretty much Scrum.

see: Tom Gilb Principles of Software Engineering Management (1988)

We do have an awful tendancy to reinvent the wheel, but I think that building Cathedrals vs building Bazaars is the wrong metaphor - I prefer building simple vs building complicated.

The "bad" people PHK describe are building complicated. The "good" people build as simple as possible, but no simpler.

edit: 1992. Only been building bungalows.

I think it's perfectly fair.

UNIX was originally written as pair-programming.

Brooks refers to agile in The Mythical Man-Month (he didn't invent it, check his references)

Right and a lot of the lean manufacturing (and 8-hour work day) research that lead up to MMM came from stuff done by Ford and Toyota before World War 1. If there hadn't been two world wars and the cold war since then I imagine this sort of knowledge might have spread around faster.

You are being overly optimistic about the pace of human cultural development. The rest of the world is only just starting to realise again that perhaps we have cultural issues that lead to low quality results. Bell Labs have numerous advantages over the rest of the world when it came to fostering the sort of culture that produces high quality results. Just reading the history books really isn't enough for that to come about.

TLDR; I blame Windows ME on World War 1.

UNIX was originally written as pair-programming.

From http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/interview-with-ken-thomps... :

KT: I did the first of two or three versions of UNIX all alone.

Later, he emphasizes that they didn't even look at each others' code:

DDJ: Was there any concept of looking at each other's code or doing code reviews?

KT: [Shaking head] We were all pretty good coders.

>>Later, he emphasizes that they didn't even look at each others' code:

I remembering reading somewhere (Dennis Ritchie's C History article?) that once they both programmed a solution without consulting each other, and later when they read it, the solution was exactly the same, even down to the variables' name.

Power of C? Two people who thought alike?

>>KT: [Shaking head] We were all pretty good coders.

Which the modern world doesn't have enough of. Demand is so high that quality of supply doesn't matter, just enough to satiate the demand; which is in stark contrast to the early days, when computer science was a research field only privy to scientists and later to hackers and crackers. When it went mainstream, and grew to an industry, its no wonder that it acquired all that which comes with it.

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