Re: Programming is not a craft

I apologize for the length here, but this touches a nerve.


I have generally found that people who deny that programming is a craft don't understand what a craft is. Mr. North is no different.


I spend a good chunk of my free time in woodworking, and it has among other things given me a language to explain how dissatisfied I am with the way houses in general and my house in particular are built in this day and age. For example:


- Insulation is considered an unnecessary expense in my part of California and so we spend more than it would cost to have insulated the house when it was constructed in less than five years trying to heat / cool the world.
- Plumb lines aren't, which makes it hard to make a door swing right (and so they stick, sometimes really hard, when it rains).
- My previous apartment had a defect in the plumbing that caused a massive reverberation to go through the entire system any time I was running the faucet at less than full bore.
- The outlet design in my current house is utterly random, with no rhyme or reason to which switches control which outlets. It is not even the case that switches in room A always control outlets in room A!
- The windows leak when it rains and let the wind in when it is windy, through no defect of the window itself but because it was mounted badly.
And so on.


Each of these are defects in the craftsmanship that are readily apparent to even a casual visitor. The idea that a poor electrician can still "get it done" and nobody but another electrician will even know is absurd; ditto plumbing. Note the idea in North's post, expressed directly, that building a bridge out of stone or building a car park is somehow not amenable to artistry. The sheer variety of both of these examples points out how farcical this position is! Some of this is the architecture, but there are for example a myriad ways to subtly screw concrete up, making it unfit for use even if it is (briefly) structurally sound.


So too in software. I have the language to know how malware gets on a computer when you don't explicitly permit it; my parents do not but they know very well that their computer gets full of junk and cruft and runs very, very slowly and sometimes not at all. Web Services, J2EE, some ill specified British über-database, these do not come from people with their nose to the grindstone.


The remainder of his argument is no more coherent than this misunderstanding of the role of craft and engineering, but I think I have undercut it sufficiently for this day.
-- 
Graham Hughes
On Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 18:43 , Chris Morris wrote:

> Anyone care to discuss Dan North's blog post on this?
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> http://dannorth.net/2011/01/11/programming-is-not-a-craft/
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> It's a topic of interest with me. Not everything in Dan's post stuck, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
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> -- 
> Chris
> http://improvingenterprises.com
> http://clabs.org
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