
Paul Buchheit: The dogmatic programmer - when software becomes religion - brett
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/dogmatic-programmer-when-software.html
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palish
Different people like doing things different ways. Some ways are better and
more secure. If you do it the expedient way you take a risk.

Anyway, I don't really have a point. I prefer doing things right over doing
things quickly (whether or not I'm writing missile guidance software). Maybe
that makes me a crappy programmer, but my results are always higher quality.

Suppose you're in the chair building business. You really want your profits,
so you hack together a quick design. You sit in it, and hey, it holds up. It's
even sorta comfy! So you build and sell them, and the customers generally like
the chair too. But after a year, they break, so they have to come back and buy
another chair. (Hey, this is sounding like a good idea, maybe I'm in the wrong
business.)

Does this abstraction hold with software? Possibly. Shipping desktop software
is a lot like shipping a chair, except upgrades are free. The web takes that
and ups the speed of updates by a factor of, say, a hundred. So now we have
the tantalizing possibility of shipping half-working software and 'fixing
things as they become a problem'.

That might be a good mantra to follow, or it might not.. Only you can decide.
I fight for quality over speed. Yeah, we only have 70-some-odd years of solid
craftsmanship left, but taking an extra few days to design something that
works better won't cause you grief and will save you headaches.

Shawn

~~~
paul
Yup, there certainly isn't anything wrong with doing things the "right" way.
It only gets to be a problem when people think that there is only one "right"
way and that everyone must follow it.

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abstractbill
First sentence, "Do believe that...", should be "Do _you_ believe that..." -
unless you deliberately wrote it like this to catch out people who believe
there's only one way to write things ;-)

Nice post btw.

~~~
paul
Oops, fixed :)

thanks

------
ralph
What are the significant savings that mean it's worth misusing GET? Is REST
really that hard? _RESTful Web Services_,
<http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260/>

