Bulldozer00's Blog

In this interview with the legendary Grady Booch, (InformIT: Grady Booch on Design Patterns, OOP, and Coffee), Larry O’Brien had this exchange with one of the original pioneers of object oriented design and the UML:

Larry: Joel Spolsky said:

“Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all. These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts. It’s very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won’t stop thinking about Architecture.”

He also said:

“Sometimes, you’re on a team, and you’re busy banging out the code, and somebody comes up to your desk, coffee mug in hand, and starts rattling on…And your eyes are swimming, and you have no friggin’ idea what this frigtard is talking about,….and it’s going to crash like crazy and you’re going to get paged at night to come in and try to figure it out because he’ll be at some goddamn “Design Patterns” meetup.”

Spolsky seems to represent a real constituency that is not just dismissive but outright hostile to software development approaches that are not code-centric. What do you say to people who are skeptical about the value of work products that don’t compile?

Grady: You may be surprised to hear that I’m firmly in Joel’s camp. The most important artifact any development team produces is raw, running, naked code. Everything else is secondary or tertiary. However, that is not to say that these other things are inconsequential. Rather, our models, our processes, our design patterns help one to build the right thing at the right time for the right stakeholders.

I think that Grady’s spot on in that both the code-centric camp and the architecture-centric camp tend to throw out what’s good from the other camp. It’s classic binary extremism where things are either black or white to the participants and the color grey doesn’t exist in their minds. Once a rigid and unwavering mindset is firmly established, the blinders are put on and all learning stops. I try to keep this in mind all the time, but the formation of a black/white mindset is hard to detect. It creeps up on you.