In his latest post, Joel explains how creating great software involves finding, and fixing, the tens of thousands of tiny things that should be better. The unfortunate side effect he describes is familiar to all who know me: “It takes a mindset of constant criticism to find them. You have to reshape your mind until you’re finding fault with everything. Your significant others go nuts. Your family wants to kill you.”
As an example (as if one were needed), just yesterday I was ranting to Casey about the Ikea website. Take a moment to visit it, and see if you can guess what drove me mad about it.
I’ll give a clue. It’s in this list:
- Norge (Norway)
- Österreich (Austria)
- Россия (Russia)
- Polska (Poland)
- Portugal (Portugal)
- România (Romania)
- Schweiz | Suisse | Svizzera (Switzerland)
Read more…
Jerry Weinberg has a wonderful post on the power of language.
Two snippets:
When someone hears that a dog is attack trained, chances are about one in three that they’ll turn to the dog and command: KILL!
As a joke.
Or just to see what the dog will do.
To protect against this idiotic human behavior, this carelessness with words, attack-dog trainers never use words like “kill” as the attack command. Instead, they use innocent words like “health” that would never be given in a command voice.
And:
A janitor can assume that changing one washer in the kitchen sink won’t incur great risk of causing the building to collapse and bury all the occupants. It’s not safe to make the same assumption for a program used every day to run a business, but because we are so free and arbitrary with words, the word “maintenance” has been misappropriated from the one circumstance to the other.
Whoever coined the word “maintenance” for computer programs was as careless and unthinking as the person who trains an attack dog to kill on the command KILL or HELLO. With the wisdom of hindsight, I would suggest that the “maintenance” programmer is more like a brain surgeon than a janitor—because opening up a working system is more like opening up a human brain and replacing an nerve than opening up a sink and replacing a washer. Would maintenance be easier to manage if it were called “software brain surgery”?
Go read the whole thing.
