Re: PG: Hackers and Painters

[James McCartney <address@hidden>]

There's multiple code ownership and there's "pair programming".

I don't like "pair programming" myself. It is like having two execution 
units working on one instruction stream. There sometimes is not enough 
parallelism in the stream to keep both busy. It involves one person 
looking out at the view waiting for the other to finish typing. In that 
situation, I'm always itching to get back to my office and get 
something done. It is OK for short stretches to work something out, 
though.

Multiple code ownership is just good sense because you're protected if 
someone quits or gets sick or gets overloaded. Also "two heads are 
better than one" applies here.


On Wednesday, May 14, 2003, at 10:19 AM, Paul Graham wrote:

> I've heard of this agile programming thing.  (Surely "agile" isn't
> the best word, btw; surely one hacker is at least more *agile*
> than two.)  There may well be cases where several people can work
> on code.  I don't think I could, though.  It's fine to have code
> reviews.  Such code reviews could even take the form of presenting
> someone with a rewritten version for them to adopt if they chose.
> But I don't think I could stand more than that.  Nor would I
> presume to do more than that to code someone else owned.
>
> Maybe I'm just an old crab though.  Does anyone on LL1 have
> any opinions about this?
>
-- 
--- james mccartney   james@audiosynth.com   <http://www.audiosynth.com>
SuperCollider - a real time audio synthesis programming language for 
MacOS X.