Hackers and Painters and Writers and Editors.

["R. Clayton" <address@hidden>]

   that's code review, not pair programming.

I'm understanding your point to be that editing is more like code reviews than
pair programming, and so has nothing to say about the value of two people
programming together.

For me to accept this point I'd need to see an essential difference between
code review and pair programming relative to the question of two vs. one.  Code
reviews are different from pair programming in any of many dimensions, but on
the question of two vs. one, they seem to me to be the same:  pair programming
is a spatially and temporally compressed form of code reviews. (This is not to
suggest that temporal and spatial differences are inessential, just that they
are irrelevant to determining the relative values of two vs. one.)

Or perhaps I'm misinterpreting you, and your point really is that editing has
nothing to say about pair programming because Maxwell Perkins never wrote
significant portions of The Great Gatsby (although with respect to Thomas Wolfe
this is less clear).  Although I agree with this point, I think it has marginal
relevance to the question of two vs. one; that Fitzgerald and Perkins were poor
extreme programmers does not gainsay the facts that Fitzgerald did not write
alone, and was a better writer for not doing so.