Well, I certainly didn’t expect that kind of interest in my last post. In the past I’ve tended to have a few hundred people reading my infrequent mumblings. In the last few days nearly 20,000 people have popped by according to my site statistics, leaving nearly 150 comments. Crikey!
The overriding message I got was that without providing evidence and concrete examples one way or the other, it was all a lot of noise about terminology. One of my intentions this year is to expand on some of the implications of Deliberate Discovery, which fit the bill nicely in illustrating programming-as-a-trade, so my next article is the start of a series of posts along that vein. I’ll let the evidence speak for itself and you can draw your own conclusions.
I’ve been very grateful for the feedback and comments, and the dialogue on Twitter. I didn’t spend as long as I might have editing and cleaning up the article, largely because I’d been tinkering with it since before Christmas, rewritten it twice, and decided it was better to publish early and respond iteratively to feedback. Typical – go out without your best underwear and you get run over by a bus.
The critical feedback generally fell into the following categories:
- How dare you! You obviously know nothing of which you speak. (Well, you decide)
- You obviously don’t / have never / no longer code / care about programming. (Not true)
- You’re using a pretty crappy definition of “craft” to put forward a bogus argument. Here’s mine / Wikipedia’s / my dad’s / a selective entry from a dictionary’s. (That’s not the point)
- You shouldn’t/can’t compare programming to building / plumbing / fine art / martial arts. (See “On metaphors” below)
- I’m angry and important so I’m just going to poke you with a stick rather than do any actual thinking. (Meh)
- Where’s your evidence? I say “craft,” you say “trade,” show me evidence it’s a trade. (My next few posts)
It seems this is a sensitive subject area so I’ll be editing more carefully from now on to try to pre-empt some of the more obvious critiques I left myself open to in the previous post.
