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copied!<p><strong>Opinion: most code out there is crappy, because that's what the programmers WANT it to be.</strong></p> <p>Indirectly, we have been nurturing a culture of extreme creativeness. It's not that I don't think problem solving has creative elements -- it does -- it's just that it's not even remotely the same as something like painting (see Paul Graham's famous "Hackers and Painters" essay). </p> <p>If we bend our industry towards that approach, ultimately it means letting every programmer go forth and whack out whatever highly creative, crazy stuff they want. Of course, for any sizable project, trying to put together dozens of unrelated, unstructured, unplanned bits into one final coherent bit won't work by definition. That's not a guess, or an estimate, it's the state of the industry that we face today. How many times have you seen sub-bits of functionality in a major program that were completely inconsistent with the rest of the code? It's so common now, it's a wonder anyone cause use any of these messes. </p> <p>Convoluted, complicated, ugly stuff that just keeps getting worse and more unstable. If we were building something physical, everyone on the planet would call us out on how horribly ugly and screwed up the stuff is, but because it more or less hidden by being virtual, we are able to get away with some of the worst manufacturing processing that our species will ever see. (Can you imagine a car where four different people designed the four different wheels, in four different ways?)</p> <p>But the sad part, the controversial part of it all, is that there is absolutely NO reason for it to be this way, other than historically the culture was towards more freedom and less organization, so we stayed that way (and probably got a lot worse). Software development is a joke, but it's a joke because that's what the programmers want it to be (but would never in a million years admit that it was true, a "plot by management" is a better reason for most people). </p> <p>How long will we keep shooting ourselves in the foot, before we wake up and realize that we the ones holding the gun, pointing it and also pulling the trigger?</p> <p>Paul.</p>

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