[NCLUG] programming question

mike cullerton michaelc at cullerton.com
Sun Jul 1 22:53:45 MDT 2001


on 7/1/01 10:17 PM, S. Luke Jones at luke at frii.com wrote:

> I've only been skimming this article, but this jumped out...
> 
> J. Paul Reed wrote:
>> Really, it's the separation of the architects from the carpenters... not to
>> belittle either.
>> 
>> I've been a member of dev teams which have really, REALLY good designers,
>> but they can't code their own linked-list... and then there are people who
>> can read those designs, and write really tight, maintainable, awesome
>> code... but if they had to design it from scratch, that'd make all sorts of
>> design errors resulting in problems down the road.
> 
> ...and I felt compelled to chime in.  What Paul describes here is IMHO
> unacceptable. It might be the state of the art, or prevailing industry
> practice, but that doesn't make it right, or for that matter practical.
> 
> There's this N-year old fantasy in the industry that you can have coders
> and architects (i.e. cheap people and expensive people) and so far as I
> can tell, it's never been proven to be effective. If you aren't any good
> at implementing, I'll wager your design is crap. If you can't design,
> then the best you can hope for is an unmaintainable mess.

you're correct that coders and designers need to understand what each other
does. i disagree that everyone should be equally skilled at both. in large
projects, everyone can't know everything. there has to be distribution of
the work.

everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. it's only natural that some
folks might be better at design than coding, or vice versa. i have good
troubleshooting and problem solving skills. given a task, i usually find it
easy to accomplish. defining the programming tasks has been harder for me
learn. the more i do the better i get.

in team situations though, coders and designers need to communicate with
each other. so, people that do both things well, they rock! :)

 -- mike cullerton




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