Are you one of those developers who can’t get his/her boss to let you download/prototype/use a Really Cool™ software package that happens to be open-source? Here’s a possible reason why.

For no reason in particular, after installing Cygwin on an old laptop onto which I just dropped Win7, I decided to also drop MinGW32, Cygwin’s main competitor in the “UNIX-on-Windows” space. Wander off to the home page, grab an installer, read the “Getting Started” instructions, and…. down at the bottom, where (as is pretty hip and common these days) random visitors can leave comments or questions to be answered by the project maintainers, we find this exchange:

Re: Getting Started

On April 7th, 2009 mago says:

Hi guys.

Will mingw work on future versions of windows?

I'm upgrading to Vista in a short time and i want to know how much 'upgrading' will make me suffer.

My guess is that you guys at Mingw should develop a new version for Vista?

Or is it just the same? What about the Win32 Api? There are surely additions with newer versions of windows.

Thanks.

Re: Getting Started

On April 7th, 2009 keith says:

I find it really insulting, when someone says "you guys should...".

This is an Open Source project, developed by volunteers in their spare time. You have no right to tell me what I should, or should not do with my spare time. Why should I, rather than you do that?

AFAIK, MinGW already does work with Vista, but why don't you just try it, and see; then contribute on the basis of your experience, either in the form of patches, or failing that, bug reports?

it’s that middle paragraph that will have your boss—any manager responsible for the installation of software within his arena of responsibility, in fact—in fits.

Don’t get me wrong: the project maintainer is clearly well within his rights to express his frustration at the fact that these people keep telling him what he should do, these people (vultures!) who keep leeching off of his hard work, who take and take with no giving back, who…

… are called “customers” in other companies, by the way, and who often have perfectly reasonable requests of the vendors from whom they get their software, because if they had time to build it themselves, they wouldn’t need to download your stuff.

I’ve been having many of the same kinds of “getting started” frustrations with installing Opa onto this same Win7 laptop box, and when I Tweeted about how the Opa experience is clearly not optimal on the Windows platform:

tedneward: @opalang looks like a great idea, but I don't get the feeling they really take Windows (or Win devs) seriously.

And their response was:

@henri_opa: @tedneward We know that Opa on windows is suboptimal and would love new contributors on the windows port in the community.

Which I interpret to mean, “We get that it’s not great, we’re sorry, but it’s not a priority enough for us to fix, so please, fix it yourself and bring that work back to the community.” Which may be great community-facing mojo, but it’s horrible vendor customer service, and it’s a clear turn-off for any attempt I might make to advise a client or customer about using it. Matter of fact, if I can’t even get the silly thing to install and run HelloWorld correctly, you’re better off not claiming Windows as a supported platform in the first place. (Which still goes towards the point that “they’re not really taking Windows or Windows developers seriously as a target market.)

This is the moral equivalent of Delta Airlines telling me, “We’re sorry we lost your bag on the flight, but we don’t have the personnel to go looking for it. If you’d like to come into the back here and rummage around for a while, or make a few phone calls to other Delta offices in other cities, we’d love the contribution.” If I am your customer, if I am the consumer of your product, whether you charged me something for it or not, then you have an implied responsibility to help me when I run into issues—or else you are not really all that concerned about me as a customer, and I won’t ever be able to convince people (for whom this kind of support is expected) to use your stuff. Matter of fact, I won’t even try.

If you’re an open-source project, and you’re trying to gain mindshare, you either think of your users as customers and treat them the way you want to be treated, or you’re just fooling yourself about your adoption, and your “community focus”. You either care about the customer, or you don’t, and if you don’t, then don’t expect customers to care about you, either.

In incarnations past, I have had debates, public and otherwise, with friends and colleagues who have asserted that HTML5 (by which we really mean HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3) will essentially become the platform of choice for all applications going forward—that essentially, this time, standards will win out, and companies that try to subvert the open nature of the web by creating their own implementations with their own extensions and proprietary features that aren’t part of the standards, lose.

Then, I read the Wired news post about Google’s departure from WebKit, and I’m a little surprised that the Internet (and by “the Internet”, I mean “the very people who get up in arms about standards and subverting them and blah blah blah”) hasn’t taken more issues with some of the things cited therein:

Google’s decision is in tune with its overall efforts to improve the infrastructure of the internet. When it comes to browser software and other web technologies that directly effect the how quickly and effectively your machine grabs and displays webpages, the company likes to use open source technologies. That way, it can feed their adoption outside the company — and ultimately improve the delivery of its many online services (including all important advertisements). But if it believes the rest of the web is moving too slowly, it has no problem starting up its own project.

Just to be clear, Google is happy to use open-source technologies, so it can feed adoption of those technologies, but if it’s something that Google thinks is being adopted too slowly—like, say, Google’s extensions to the various standards that aren’t being picked up by its competitors—then Google feels the need to kick off its own thing. Interesting.

… [T]he trouble with WebKit is that is used different “multi-process architecture” than its Chrome browser, which basically means it didn’t handle concurrent tasks in the same way. When Chrome was first released in 2008 WebKit didn’t have a multi-process architecture, so Google had to build its own. WebKit2, released in 2010, adds multi-process features, but is quite different from what Google had already built. Apple and Google don’t see eye to eye on the project, and it became too difficult and too time-consuming for the company juggle the two architectures. “Supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both [projects],” the post says. “This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation.”

So… Google tried to use some open-source software, but discovered that the project didn’t work the way they built the rest of their application to work. (I’m certain that’s the first time that has happened, ever.) When the custodians of the project did add the feature Google wanted, the feature was implemented in a manner that still wasn’t in lockstep with the way Google wanted things to work in their application. This meant that “innovation” is “slowed down”.

(As an aside, I find it fascinating that whenever a company adopts open-source, it’s to “foster interoperability and open standards”, but when they abandon open-source, it’s to “foster innovation and faster evolution”. And I’m sure it’s entirely accidental that most of the time, adopting “open standards” is usually when the company is way behind on the technology curve for a given thing, and adopting “faster innovation” is usually when that same company thinks they’ve caught up the distance or surged ahead of their competitors in that space.)

Of course, a new implementation has its risks of bugs and incompatibilities, but Google has a plan for that:

“Throughout this transition, we’ll collaborate closely with other browser vendors to move the web forward and preserve the compatibility that made it a successful ecosystem,” the announcement reads.

Ah, there. See? By collaborating closely with their competitors, they will preserve compatibility. Because when Microsoft did that, everybody was totally OK with that…. uh, and… yeah… it worked pretty well, too, and….

Look, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that even if the tags and the DOM and the APIs are all 100% unchanged from Chrome v.Past to v.Next, there’s still going to be places where they optimize differently than WebKit does, which means now that developers will need to learn (and implement) optimizations in their Web-based applications differently. And frankly, the assumption that Chrome’s Blink and WebKit will somehow be bug-for-bug compatible/identical with each other is a pretty steep bar to accept blindly, considering the history.

Once again, we see the cycle coming around: in the beginning, when a technology is fleshing out, companies yearn for standards in order to create adoption. After a certain tipping point of adoption, however, the major players start to seek ways to avoid becoming a commodity, and start introducing “extensions” and “innovations” that for some odd reason their competitors in the standards meetings don’t seem all that inclined to adopt. That’s when they start forking and shying away from staying true to the standard, and eventually, the standard becomes either a least-common-denominator… or a joke.

Anybody want to bet on which outcome emerges for HTML5?

(Before you reach for the “Comment” link to flame me all to Hell, yes, even an HTML 5 standard that is 80% consistent across all the browsers is still pretty damn useful—just as a SQL standard that is 80% consistent across all the databases is useful. But this is a far cry from the utopia of interconnectedness and interoperability that was promised to us by the HTMLophiles, and it simply demonstrates that the Circle of TechnoLife continues, unabated, as it has ever since PC manufacturers—and the rest of us watching them--discovered what happens to them when they become a commodity.)

As is pretty typical for that site, Lambda the Ultimate has a great discussion on some insights that the creators of Mozart and Oz have come to, regarding the design of programming languages; I repeat the post here for convenience:

Now that we are close to releasing Mozart 2 (a complete redesign of the Mozart system), I have been thinking about how best to summarize the lessons we learned about programming paradigms in CTM. Here are five "laws" that summarize these lessons:

1. A well-designed program uses the right concepts, and the paradigm follows from the concepts that are used. [Paradigms are epiphenomena]
2. A paradigm with more concepts than another is not better or worse, just different. [Paradigm paradox]
3. Each problem has a best paradigm in which to program it; a paradigm with less concepts makes the program more complicated and a paradigm with more concepts makes reasoning more complicated. [Best paradigm principle]
4. If a program is complicated for reasons unrelated to the problem being solved, then a new concept should be added to the paradigm. [Creative extension principle]
5. A program's interface should depend only on its externally visible functionality, not on the paradigm used to implement it. [Model independence principle]

Here a "paradigm" is defined as a formal system that defines how computations are done and that leads to a set of techniques for programming and reasoning about programs. Some commonly used paradigms are called functional programming, object-oriented programming, and logic programming. The term "best paradigm" can have different meanings depending on the ultimate goal of the programming project; it usually refers to a paradigm that maximizes some combination of good properties such as clarity, provability, maintainability, efficiency, and extensibility. I am curious to see what the LtU community thinks of these laws and their formulation.

Charlie Kindel blogs that he thinks James Gosling (and the rest of Sun) screwed us all with Java and it's "Write Once, Run Anywhere" mantra. It's catchy, but it's wrong.

Like a lot of Charlie's blogs, he nails parts of this one squarely on the head:

WORA was, is, and always will be, a fallacy. ... It is the “Write once…“ part that’s the most dangerous. We all wish the world was rainbows and unicorns, and “Write once…” implies that there is a world where you can actually write an app once and it will run on all devices. But this is precisely the fantasy that the platform vendors will never allow to become reality. ...

HTML5 is awesome in many ways. If applied judiciously, it can be a great technology and tool. As a tool, it can absolutely be used to reduce the amount of platform specific code you have to write. But it is not a starting place. Starting with HTML5 is the most customer unfriendly thing a developer can do. ... Like many ‘solutions’ in our industry the “Hey, write it once in in HTML5 and it will run anywhere” story didn’t actually start with the end-user customer. It started with idealistic thoughts about technology. It was then turned into snake oil for developers. Not only is the “build a mobile app that hosts a web view that contains HTML5″ approach bass-ackwards, it is a recipe for execution disaster. Yes, there are examples of teams that have built great apps using this technique, but if you actually look at what they did, they focused on their experience first and then made the technology work. What happens when the shop starts with “we gotta use HTML5 running in a UIWebView” is initial euphoria over productivity, followed by incredible pain doing the final 20%.

In fact, about the only part of Charlie's blog post that I disagree with is the part where he blames Gosling and Java:

I blame James Gosling. He foisted Java on us and as a result Sun coined the term Write Once Run Anywhere. ... Developers really want to believe it is possible to “Write once…”. They also really want to believe that more threads will help. But we all know they just make the problems worse. Just as we’ve all grown to accept that starting with “make it multi-threaded” is evil, we need to accept “Write once…” is evil.

And that, folks, is the heart of the matter: long before Gosling took his fledgling failed set-top box Oak-named project and looked around for a space to which to apply it next, developers... no, let's get that right, "developers and their managers who hate the idea of violating DRY by having the code in umpteen different codebases" have been looking for ways to have a single source base that runs across all the platforms. We've tried it with portable languages (see C, C++, Java, for starters), portable libraries (in the C++ space see Zinc, zApp, XVT, Tools.h++), portable containers (see EJB, the web browser), and now portable platforms (see PhoneGap/Cordova, Titanium, etc), portable cross-compilers (see MonoTouch/MonoDroid, for recent examples), and I'm sure there will be other efforts along these lines for years and decades to come. It's a noble goal, but the major players in the space to which we are targeting--whether that be operating systems, browsers, mobile platforms, console game devices, or whatever comes next two decades from now--will not allow their systems to be commoditized that easily. Because at the heart of it, that's exactly what these "cross-platform" tools and languages and libraries are trying to do: reduce the underlying "thing" to a commodity that lacks interest or impact.

Interestingly enough, as a side-note, one thing I'm starting to notice is that the more pervasive mobile devices become and the more mobile applications we see reaching those devices, the less and less "device-standard" those interfaces are trying to look even as they try to achieve cross-platform similarities. Consider, for a moment, the Fly Delta app on iPhone: it doesn't really use any of the standard iOS UI metaphors (except for some of the basic ones), largely because they've defined their own look-and-feel across all the platforms they support (iOS and Android, at least so far). Ditto for the CNN and USA Today apps, as well as the ESPN app, and of course just about every game ever written for any of those platforms. So even as Charlie argues:

The problem is each major platform has its own UI model, its own model for how a web view is hosted, its own HTML rendering engine, and its own JavaScript engine. These inter-platform differences mean that not only is the platform-specific code unique, but the interactions between that code and the code running within the web view becomes device specific. And to make matters worse intra-platform fragmentation, particularly on the platform with the largest number of users, Android, is so bad that this “Write Once..” approach provides no help.

While cruising through the Internet a few minute ago, I wandered across Meteor, which looks like a really cool tool/system/platform/whatever for building modern web applications. JavaScript on the front, JavaScript on the back, Mongo backing, it's definitely something worth looking into, IMHO.

Thus emboldened, I decide to look at how to start playing with it, and lo and behold I discover that the instructions for installation are:

curl https://install.meteor.com | sh

Now, I'm sure the Meteor folks are all nice people, and they're making sure (via the use of the https URL) that whatever is piped into my shell is, in fact, coming from their servers, but I don't know these people from Adam or Eve, and that's taking an awfully big risk on my part, just letting them pipe whatever-the-hell-they-want into a shell Terminal. Hell, you don't even need root access to fill my hard drive with whatever random bits of goo you wanted.

I looked at the shell script, and it's all OK, mind you--the Meteor people definitely look trustworthy, I want to reassure anyone of that. But I'm really, really hoping that this is NOT their preferred mechanism for delivery... nor is it anyone's preferred mechanism for delivery... because that's got a gaping security hole in it about twelve miles wide. It's just begging for some random evil hacker to post a website saying, "Hey, all, I've got his really cool framework y'all should try..." and bury the malware inside the code somewhere.

Which leads to today's Random Thought Experiment of the Day: How long would it take the open source community to discover malware buried inside of an open-source package, particularly one that's in widespread use, a la Apache or Tomcat or JBoss? (Assume all the core committers were in on it--how many people, aside from the core committers, actually look at the source of the packages we download and install, sometimes under root permissions?)

Not saying we should abandon open source; just saying we should be responsible citizens about who we let in our front door.

UPDATE: Having done the install, I realize that it's a two-step download... the shell script just figures out which OS you're on, which tool (curl or wget) to use, and asks you for root access to download and install the actual distribution. Which, honestly, I didn't look at. So, here's hoping the Meteor folks are as good as I'm assuming them to be....

Still highlights that this is a huge security risk.

TL;DR Live craftsmanship, don't preach it. The creation of a label serves no purpose other than to disambiguate and distinguish. If we want to hold people accountable to some sort of "professionalism", then we have to define what that means. I found Uncle Bob's treatment of my blog heavy-handed and arrogant. I don't particularly want to debate this anymore; this is my last take on the subject.

I will freely admit, I didn't want to do this. I really didn't. I had hoped that after my second posting on the subject, the discussion would kind of fade away, because I think we'd (or I'd, at least) wrought about the last few drops of discussion and insight and position on it. The same memes were coming back around, the same reactions, and I really didn't want to perpetuate the whole thing ad infinitum because I don't really think that's the best way to reach any kind of result or positive steps forward. I'd said my piece, I was happy about it.

Alas, such was not to be. Uncle Bob posted his thoughts, and quite frankly, I think he did a pretty bad job of hearing what I had to say, couching it in terms of populism (I stopped counting the number of times he used that word at six or so) even as he framed in it something of his own elitist argument.

Bob first points us all at the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship. Because everyone who calls themselves a craftsman has to obey this manifesto. It's in the rules somewhere. Sort of like the Agile Manifesto--if you're not a signatory, you're doing it wrong.

(Oh, I know, to suggest that there is even the smallest thing wrong with the Agile Manifesto borders on heresy. Which, if that's the reaction you have, should be setting off a few warning bells in your head--something about replacing dogma with dogma.)

And you know what? I actually agree with most of the principles of the Craftsmanship Manifesto. It's couched in really positive, uplifting language: who doesn't want "well-crafted" software, or "steadily-increasing value", or "productive partnerships"? It's a wonderfully-worded document that unfortunately is way short on details, but hey, it should be intuitively obvious to anyone who is a craftsman, right?

See, this is part of my problem. Manifestos tend to be long on rhetoric, but very, very short on details. The Agile Manifesto is another example. It stresses "collaboration" and "working software" and "interactions" and "responding to change", but then people started trying to figure out how to apply this, and we got into the knife-fights that people arguing XP vs. Scrum vs. Kanban vs. your-homebrewed-craptaculous-brand-of-"little-a"-agile turned into brushfire wars. It's wonderful to say what the end result should be, but putting that into practice is a whole different ball of wax. So I'm a little skeptical any time somebody points to a Manifesto and says, "I believe in that, and that should suffice for you".

Frankly, if we want this to have any weight whatsoever, I think we should model something off the Hippcratic Oath, instead--it at least has prescriptive advice within it, telling doctors what they can and cannot (or, perhaps worded more accurately, should or should not) do. (I took something of a stab at this six years ago. It could probably use some work and some communal input; it was a first iteration.)

Besides (beware the accusation coming of my attempt at a false-association argument here, this is just for snarkiness purposes!), other manifestos haven't always worked out so well.

So by "proving [that I misinterpreted the event] by going to the Manifesto", you're kind of creating a circular argument: "What happened can't have been because of Software Craftsmanship, because look, there, in the Manifesto, it says we don't do that, so clearly, we can't have done that. It says it, right there! Seriously!"

The Supposed "Segregation"

Bob then says I'm clearly mistaken about "craftsmen" creating a segregation, because there's nothing about segregation in the manifesto:

any intimation of those who "get it" vs. those who don't; or any mention of the "right" tools or the "right" way. Indeed, what I see instead is a desire to steadily add value by writing well-crafted software while working in a community of professionals who behave as partners with their customers. That doesn't sound like "narcissistic, high-handed, high-minded" elitism to me.

Bob then goes on an interesting leap of logical assumption here. He takes my definition of a "software laborer":

"somebody who comes in at 9, does what they're told, leaves at 5, and never gives a rat's ass about programming except for what they need to know to get their job done [...] who [crank] out one crappy app after another in (what else?) Visual Basic, [that] were [...] sloppy, bloated, ugly [...] cut-and-paste cobbled-together duct-tape wonders."

Now let's look past the hyperbole, and the populist jargon, and see if we can identify just who Ted is talking about. Firstly, they work 9-5. Secondly, they get their job done. Thirdly, they crank out lots of (apparently useful) apps. And finally, they make a mess in the code. The implication is that they are not late, have no defects, and their projects never fail.

(See what I did there? I make Bob sound old and cantankerous. Not that he would do the same to himself, trying to use his years of experience as a subtle bludgeon to anyone who's younger and therefore less experienced--less professional, by implication--in his argument, right?

Programming is barely 60 years old. I, personally, have been programming for 43+ of those years.

Having sort of wrested my definition of the laborer away from me, Bob goes on:

I've never met these people. In my experience a mess in the code equates to lots of overtime, deep schedule overruns, intolerable defect rates, and frequent project failure -- not to mention eventual redesign.

Bob goes on to sort of run with this theme:

Ted has created a false dichotomy that appeals to a populist ideology. There are the elite, condescending, self-proclaimed craftsmen, and then there are the humble, honorable, laborers. Ted then declares his allegiance to the latter... .

Generally, populists tend to claim that they side with "the people" against "the elites". While for much of the twentieth century, populism was considered to be a political phenomenon mostly affecting Latin America, since the 1980s populist movements and parties have enjoyed degrees of success in First World democracies such as the USA, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries.

So either I'm talking into a vacuum, or there's more of a divide than Bob thinks. You make the call on that one.

Shall we continue?

He strengthens his identity with, and affinity for, these laborers by telling a story about a tea master and a samurai (or was it some milk and a cow) which further extends and confuses the false dichotomy.

Oh, the Horror! ... of Ted's Psyche

Not content to analyze the argument, because clearly (he says this so many times, it must be true) my argument is so weak as to not stand on its own (even though I'm not sure, looking back at this point, that Bob has really attacked the argument itself at all, other than to say, "Look at the Manifesto!"), he decides to engage in a little personal attack:

I'm not a psychoanalyst; and I don't really want to dive deep into Ted's psyche to unravel the contradictions and false dichotomies in his blog. However, I will make one observation. In his blog Ted describes his own youthful arrogance as a C++ programmer... It seems to me that Ted is equating his own youthful bad behavior with "craftsmanship". He ascribes his own past arrogance and self-superiority with an entire movement. I find that very odd and very unfortunate. I'm not at all sure what prompted him to make such a large and disconnected leap in reasoning. While it is true that the Software Craftsmanship movement is trying to raise awareness about software quality; it is certainly not doing so by promoting the adolescent behavior that Ted now disavows.

Know what? I think one thing that got lost somewhere in all this debate is that value is only value if it's of value to the customer. And in a lot of the "craftsmanship" debates, I don't hear the customer's voice being brought up all that much.

You remember all those crappy VB apps that Bob maligned earlier? Was the customer happy? Did anybody stop to ask them? Or was the assumption that, since the code was crappy, the customer implicitly must be unhappy as well? Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of crappy code out there that doesn't make the customer happy. As a matter of fact, I'll argue that any code that doesn't make the customer happy is crap, regardless of what language it's written in or what patterns it uses or how decoupled or injected or new databases it stores data into. Value isn't value unless it's value to the person who's paying for the code.

Bob Discusses the Dichotomy

Eh, I'm getting tired of writing all this, and I'm sure you're getting tired of reading it, so let's finish up and call it a day. Bob goes on to start dissecting my false dichotomy, starting with:

Elitism is not encouraged in the Software Craftsmanship community. Indeed we reject the elitist attitude altogether. Our goal is not to make others feel bad about their code. Our goal is to teach programmers how to write better code, and behave better as professionals. We feel that the software industry urgently needs to raise the bar of professionalism.

But "raising the bar of professionalism", again, misses a crucial point, one that I've tried to raise earlier: Who defines what that "professionalism" looks like? Does the three-line Perl hack qualify as "professionalism" if it gets the job done for the customer so they can move on? Or does it need to be rewritten in Ruby, using convention over configuration, and a whole host of dynamic language/metaprogramming/internal DSL tricks? What defines professionalism in our world? In medicine, it's defined pretty simply: is the patient healthier or not after the care? In the legal profession, it's "did we represent the client to the best of our ability while remaining in compliance with the rules of ethics laid down by the bar and the laws of the entity in which we practice?" What defines "professionalism" in software? When you can tell me what that looks like, in concrete, without using words that allow for high degree of interpretation, then we can start to make progress towards whether or not my "laborers" are, in actuality, professionals.

We continue.

There are few "laborers" who fit the mold that Ted describes. While there are many 9-5 programmers, and many others who write cut-paste code, and still others who write big, ugly, bloated code, these aren't always the same people. I know lots of 12-12 programmers who work hellish hours, and write bloated, ugly, cut-paste code. I also know many 9-5 programmers who write clean and elegant code. I know 9-5ers who don't give a rat's ass, and I know 9-5ers who care deeply. I know 12-12ers who's only care is to climb the corporate ladder, and others who work long hours for the sheer joy of making something beautiful.

The Real Problem

Bob goes on to talk about the youth of our industry, but I think the problem is a different one. Yes, we're a young industry, but frankly, so is Marketing and Sales (they've only really existed in their modern forms for about sixty or seventy years, maybe a hundred if you stretch the definitions a little), and ditto for medicine (remember, it was only about 150 years ago that surgeons were also barbers). Yes, we have a LOT to learn yet, and we're making a lot of mistakes, I think, because our youth is causing us to reach out to other, highly imperfect metaphor/role-model industries for terminology and inspiration. (Cue the discussion of "software architecture" vs "building architecture" here.) Personally, I think we've learned a lot, we're continuing to learn more, and we're reaching a point where looking at other industries for metaphors is reaching a practical end in terms of utility to us.

The bigger problem? Economics. The supply and demand curve.

Neal Ford pointed out on an NFJS panel a few years back that the demand for software vastly exceeds the supply of programmers to build it. I don't know where he got that--whether he read that somewhere or that formed out of his own head--but he's absolutely spot-on right, and it seriously throws the whole industry out of whack.

If the software labor market were like painting, or car repair, or accounting, then the finite demand for people in those positions would mean that those who couldn't meet customer satisfaction would eventually starve and die. Or, more likely, take up some other career. It's a natural way to take the bottom 20% of the bell curve (the portion out to the far right) of potential practitioners, and keep them from ruining some customers' life. If you're a terrible painter, no customers will use you (at least, not twice), and while I suppose you could pick up and move to a new market every year or so until you're run out of town on a rail for crappy work, quite honestly, most people will just give up and go do something else. There are thousands--millions--of actors and actresses in Southern California that never make it to stage or screen, and they wait tables until they find a new thing to pursue that adds value to their customers' lives in such a way that they can make a living.

But software... right now, if you walk out into the middle of the street in San Francisco wearing a T-shirt that says, "I write Rails code", you will have job offers flying after you like the paper airplanes in Disney's just-released-to-the-Internet video short. IT departments are throwing huge amounts of cash into mechanisms, human or otherwise, working or otherwise, to help them find developers. Software engineering has been at the top of the list of "best jobs" for several years, commanding high salaries in a relatively stress-free environment, all in a period of time that many of equated to be the worst economic cycle since the Great Depression. Don't believe me? Take a shot yourself, go to a Startup Weekend and sign up as a developer: there are hundreds of people with new app ideas (granted, most of them total fantasy) who are just looking for a "technical co-founder" to help them see their dream to reality. IT departments will take anybody right now, and I do mean anybody. I'm reasonably convinced that half the reason software development outsourcing overseas happens is because it's a choice between putting up with doing the development overseas, even with all of the related problems and obstacles that come up, or not doing the development at all for lack of being able to staff the team to do it. (Which would you choose, if you were the CTO--some chance of success, or no chance at all?)

Wrapping up

Bob wraps up with this:

The result is that most programmers simply don't know where the quality bar is. They don't know what disciplines they should adopt. They don't know the difference between good and bad code. And, most importantly, they have not learned that writing good clean code in a disciplined manner is the fastest and best way get the job done well.

We, in the Software Craftsmanship movement are trying to teach those lessons. Our goal is to raise the awareness that software quality matters. That doing a good job means having pride in workmanship, being careful, deliberate, and disciplined. That the best way to miss a deadline, and lay the seeds of defeat, is to make a mess.

We, in the Software Craftsmanship movement are promoting software professionalism.

Seriously? You can't see how that comes across as elitist? And arrogant?

Look, I really don't mean to perpetuate this whole argument, and I'm reasonably sure that Uncle Bob is already firing up his blog editor to point out all the ways in which my "populist ideology" is falsly dichotomous or whatever. I'm tired of this argument, to be honest, so let me try to sum up my thoughts on this whole mess in what I hope will be a few, easy-to-digest bullet points:

1. Live craftsmanship, don't preach it. If you hold the craftsman meme as a way of trying to improve yourself, then you and I have no argument. If you put "software craftsman" on your business cards, or website, or write Manifestos that you try to use as a bludgeon in an argument, then it seems to me that you're trying to distinguish yourself from the rest, and that to me smacks of elitism. You may not think of yourself as covering yourself in elitism, but to a lot of the rest of the world, that's exactly how you're coming off. Sorry if that's not how you intended it.
2. Value is only value if the customer sees it as value. And the customer gets to define what is valuable to them, not you. You can (and should) certainly try to work with them to understand what they see as value, and you can (and should) certainly try to help them see how there may be value in ways they don't see today. But at the end of the day, they are the customer, they are paying the checks, and even after advising them against it, if they want to prioritize quick-and-dirty over longer-and-elegant, then (IMHO) that's what you do. Because they may have reasons for choosing that approach that they simply don't care to share with you, and it's their choice.
3. The creation of a label serves no purpose other than to disambiguate and distinguish. If there really is no blue-collar programming workforce, Bob, then I challenge you to drop the term "craftsman" from your bio, profile, and self-description anywhere it appears, and replace it with "programer". Or else refer to all software developers as "craftsmen" (in which case the term becomes meaningless, and thus useless). Because, let's face it, how many doctors do you know who put "Hippocratic-sworn" somewhere on their business cards?
4. If we want to hold people accountable to some sort of "professionalism", then we have to define what that means. The definition of the term "professional" is not really what we want, in practice, for it's usually defined as "somebody who got paid to do the job". The Craftsmanship Manifesto seems to want some kind of code of ethics or programmer equivalent to the Hippocratic Oath, so that the third precept isn't "a community of people who are paid to do what they do", but something deeper and more meaningful and concrete. (I don't have that definition handy, by the way, so don't look to me for it. But I will also roundly reject anyone who tries to use the Potter Stewart-esque "I can't define it but I know it when I see it" approach, because now we're back to individual interpretation.)
5. I found Uncle Bob's treatment of my blog heavy-handed and arrogant. In case that wasn't obvious. And I reacted in similar manner, something for which I will apologize now. By reacting in that way, I'm sure I perpetuate the blog war, and truthfully, I have a lot of respect for Bob's technical skills; I was an avid fan of his C++ articles for years, and there's a lot of good technical ideas and concepts that any programmer would be well-advised to learn. His technical skill is without question; his compassion and empathy, however, might be. (As are mine, for stooping to that same level.)

TL;DR: To all those who dissented, you're right, but you're wrong. Craftsmanship is a noble meme, when it's something that somebody holds as a personal goal, but it's often coming across as a way to beat up and denigrate on others who don't choose to invest significant time and energy into programming. The Zen Masters didn't walk around the countryside, proclaiming "I am a Zen Master!"

Wow. Apparently I touched a nerve.

It's been 48 hours since I posted On the Dark Side of 'Craftsmanship', and it's gotten a ton of interest, as well as a few syndicated re-posts (DZone and a few others). Comments to the blog included a response from Dave Thomas, other blog posts have been brought to my attention, and Twitter was on FIRE with people pinging me with their thoughts, which turn out to be across the spectrum, approving and dissenting. Not at all what I really expected to happen, to be honest--I kinda thought it would get lost in the noise of others commenting around the whole thing.

But for whatever reason, it's gotten a lot of attention, so I feel a certain responsibility to respond and explain to some of the dissenters who've responded. Not to defend, per se, but to at least demonstrate some recognition and attempt to clarify my position where I think it's gotten mis-heard. (To those who approved of the message, thank you for your support, and I'm happy to have vocalized something you felt unable, unwilling, unheard, or too busy to vocalize yourself. I hope my explanations here continue to represent your opinions, but if not, please feel free to let me know.)

A lot of the opinions centered around a few core ideas, it seems, so let me try and respond to those first.

You're confusing "craftsmanship" with a few people behaving badly. That may well be, but those who behaved badly included at least one who holds himself up as a leader of the craftsman movement and has held his actions up as indications of how "craftsmen" should behave. When you do this, you invite this kind of criticism and association. So if the movement is being given a black eye because of the actions of a single individual, well, now you know how a bunch of moderate Republicans feel about Paul Ryan.

Corey is a nice guy, he apologized, don't crucify him. Of course he is. Corey is a nice guy--and, speaking well to his character, he apologized almost immediately when it all broke. I learned a long time ago that "true sorry" means you (a) apologize for your actions, (b) seek to remedy the damage your actions have caused ("make it right", in other words), and (c) avoid making the same mistake in the future. From a distance, it seems like he feels contrition, and has publicly apologized for his actions. I would hope he's reached out to Heather directly to try and make things right with her, but that's between the two of them. Whether he avoids this kind of activity in the future remains to be seen. I think he will, but that's because I think he's learned a harsh lesson about being in the spotlight--it tends to be a harsh place to be. The rest of this really isn't about Corey and Heather anymore, so as far as I'm concerned, that thread complete.

You misunderstand the nature of "craftsmanship". Actually, no, I don't. At its heart, the original intent of "craftsmanship" was a constant striving to be better about what you do, and taking pride in the things that you do. It's related to the Japanese code of the samurai (kaizen) that says, in essence, that we are constantly striving to get better. The samurai sought to become better swordsmen, constantly challenging each other to prove the mettle against one another, improving their skills and, conditioning, but also their honor, by how they treated each other, their lord, their servants, and those they sought to protect. Kanban is a wonderful code, and one I have tried to live my entire life, even before I'd discovered it. Please don't assume that I misunderstand the teachings of your movement just because I don't go to the meetings.

Why you pick on "craftsmanship", anyway? If I want to take pride in what I do, what difference does it make? This is me paraphrasing on much of the dissent, and my response boils down to two basic thoughts:

1. If you think your movement is "just about yourself", why invent a label to differentiate yourself from the rest?
2. If you invent a label, it becomes almost automatic to draw a line between "us" and "them", and that in of itself almost automatically leads to "us vs them" behavior and mentality.

There were some specific blogs and comments that I think deserve discusson, too:

Dave Thomas was kind enough to comment on my blog:

I remember the farmer comment :) I think I said 30%, but I stand by what I said. And it isn't really an elitist stance. Instead, I feel that programming is hard work. At the end of a day of coding, I'm tired. And so I believe that if you are asking someone to do programming, then it is in both your and their interest that they are doing something they enjoy. Because if they don't enjoy it, then they are truly just a laborer, working hard at something that has no meaning to them. And as you spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week doing it, that seems like an awful waste of an intelligent person's life.

The farming quote was a deliberate attempt at being shocking to make a point. But I still think it is valid. I'd guess that 30% of the developers I meet are not happy in their work. And I think those folks would be happier and more fulfilled doing something else that gave them more satisfaction.

No one should have to be a laborer.

Nate commented:

You have a logical fallacy by lumping together the people that derided Heather's code and people that are involved in software craftmanship. It's actually a huge leap of logic to make that connection, and it really retracts from the article.

Now you realise that you are planting your flag firmly in the 'craftmanship' camp while propelling your position upwards by drawing a line in the sand to define another group of people as 'labourers'. Or in other words attempt to elevate yourself by patronising others with the position you think you are paying them a compliment. Maybe you do not realise this?

However, have you considered that the craft is not how awesome and perfect you and your code are, but what is applicable for the task at hand. I think most people who you would put into either camp share the same mix of attributes whether good or bad. The important thing is if the solution created does what it is designed to do, is delivered on time for when it is needed and if the environment that the solution has been created for warrants it, that the code is easily understandable by yourself and others (that matter) so it can be developed further over time and maintained.

I don't wish to judge you, and maybe you are a great, smart guy who does good in the world, but like you I have not researched anything about you, I have simply read your assessment above and come to a conclusion, that's being human I guess.

The above just sounds like more of the same 'elitism' that has been ripe in this world from playground to the workplace since the beginning.

In It's OK to love your job, Chad McCallum says that

The basic premise (or at least the one the author start out with) is that because there’s a self-declared group of “software craftspeople”, there is going to be an egotistical divide between those who “get it” and those who don’t.

Chad also says,

It’s true the feedback that Heather got was unnecessarily negative. And that it came from people who are probably considered “software craftspeople”. That said, correlation doesn’t equal causation. I’m guessing the negative feedback was more because those original offenders had a bad day and needed to vent. And maybe the comments after that one just jumped on the bandwagon because someone with lots of followers and/or respect said it.

These are both things that can and have happened to anyone, regardless of the industry they work in. It’s extremely unfair to associate “someone who’s passionate about software development” to “person who’s waiting to jump on you for your mistakes”.

Chad closes his blog with "Stop calling us egotistical jerks just because we love what we do." To which I respond, "I am happy to do so, as soon as those 'craftsmen' who are acting like one, stop acting like one." If you're not acting like one, then there should be no argument here. If you're trying to tell me that your label is somehow immune to criticism, then I think we just have to agree to disagree.

Paul Pagel (on a site devoted to software craftsmanship, no less) responded as well with his Humble Pursuit of Mastery. He opens with:

I have been reading on blogs and tweets the sentiment that "software craftsmanship is elitism". This perception is formed around comments of code, process, or techniques. I understand a craftsman's earned sense of pride in their work can sometimes be inappropriately communicated.

Paul then goes through a summation of his career, making sure to smallcaps certain terms with which I have no argument: "sacrifice", "listen", "practicing", "critique" and "teaching". And, in all honesty, these are things that I embrace, as well. But I start getting a little dubious about the sanctity of your terminology, Paul, when it's being used pretty blatantly as an advertising slogan and theme all over the site--if you want the term to remain a Zen-like pursuit, then you need to keep the commercialism out of it, in my opinion, or you invite the kind of criticism that's coming here (explicit or implicit).

Paul's conclusion wraps up with:

Do sacrificing, listening, practice, critiquing, and teaching sound like elitist qualities to you? Software craftsmanship starts out as a humble endeavor moving towards mastery. I won't let 140 or 1000 characters redefine the hours and years spent working hard to become a craftsman. It gave me humility and the confidence to be a professional software developer. Sometimes I let confidence get the better of me, but I know when that happens I am not honoring the spirit of craftsmanship which I was trained.

Finally, Matt van Horn wrote in Crafsmanship, a rebuttal that:

there is an allusion to software craftsmen as being an exclusive group who agre on the “right” tools and techniques. This could not be further from the truth. Anyone who is serious about their craft knows that for every job there are some tools that are better and some that are worse.

Now, I may not have a good definition of elegant code, but I definitely know it when I see it – regardless of who wrote it. If you can’t see that

(1..10).each{|i| puts i}

is more elegant than

x = 0
while true do
  x = x + 1
  if x > 10
    break
  end
  puts x
end

then you must near the beginning of your journey towards mastery. Practicing your craft develops your ability to recognize these differences, just as a skilled tailor can more easily spot the difference between a bespoke suit and something from Men’s Wearhouse.

Or, to put it much more succinctly, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder".

Matt then tells me I missed the point of the samurai and tea master story:

inally, he closes with a famous zen story, but he entirely misses the point of it. The story concerns a tea master, and a samurai, who get into a duel. The tea master prevails by bringing the same concentration to the duel that he brings to his tea ceremony. The point that Ted seems to miss here is that the tea master is a craftsman of the highest order. A master of cha-do (the way of tea) is able to transform the simple act of making and pouring a cup of tea into something transcendant by bringing to this simple act a clear mind, a good attitude, and years of patient, humble practice. Arguably he prevails because he has perfected his craft to a higher degree than the samurai has perfected his own. That is why he has earned the right to wear the garb of a samurai, and why he is able to face down his opponent.

Billy Hollis is a master with VB, far more than I ever will be; I know C++ far better than he ever will. I respect his abilities, and he, mine. There is no argument here. But more importantly, there are friends I've worked with in the past who are masters with neither VB nor C++, nor any other programming language, but chose instead to sink their time and energy into skiing, pottery, or being a fan of a television show. They chose to put their energies--energies the "craftsmen" seem to say should be put towards their programming--towards things that bring them joy, which happen to not be programming.

Which brings me to another refrain that came up over and over again: You criticize the craftsman, but then you draw a distinction between "craftsman" and "laborer". You're confusing (or confused). First of all, I think it important to disambiguate along two axes: those who are choosing to invest their time into learning to write better software, and those who are choosing to look at writing code as "just" a job as one axis, and along a second axis, the degree to which they have mastered programming. By your own definitions, "craftsmen", can one be early in your mastery of programming and still be a "craftsman"? Can one be a master bowler who's just picked up programming and be considered a "craftsman"? Is the nature of "craftsmanship" a measure of your skill, or is it your dedication to programming, or is it your dedication to something in your life, period? (Remember, the tea master parable says that a master C++ developer will see the master bowler and respect his mastery of bowling, even though he can't code worth a crap. Would you call him a "craftsman"?)

Frankly, I will say, for the record, that I think there are people programming who don't want to put a ton of time and energy into learning how to be better programmers. (I suspect that most of them won't ever read this blog, either.) They see the job as "just a job", and are willing to be taught how to do things, but aren't willing to go off and learn how to do them on their own. They want to do the best job they can, because they, like any human being, want to bring value to the world, but don't have that passion for programming. They want to come in at 9, do their job, and go home at 5. These are those whom I call "laborers". They are the "fisherman" in the following story:

The businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The businessman complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied only a little while.

The businessman then asked why he didn't stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family's immediate needs. The businessman then asked, but what do you do with the rest of your time? The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos; I have a full and busy life, señor."

The businessman scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and I could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats; eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the processor and eventually open your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City where you would run your expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But señor, how long will this all take?" To which the businessman replied, "15-20 years." "But what then, señor?" The businessman laughed and said, "That's the best part! When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions." "Millions, señor? Then what?" The businessman said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."

What makes all of this (this particular subject, craftsmanship) particularly hard for me is that I like the message that craftsmanship brings, in terms of how you conduct yourself. I love the book Apprenticeship Patterns, for example, and think that anyone, novice or master, should read this book. I have taken on speaking apprentices in the past, and will continue to do so well into the future. The message that underlies the meme of craftsmanship--the constant striving to improve--is a good one, and I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you have adopted "craftsmanship" as a core value of yours, then please, by all means, continue to practice it! Myself, I choose to do so, as well. I have mentored programmers, I have taken speaking apprentices, and I strive to learn more about my craft by branching my studies out well beyond software--I am reading books on management, psychology, building architecture, and business, because I think there is more to software than just the choice of programming language or style.

But be aware that if you start telling people how you're living your life, there is an implicit criticism or expectation that they should be doing that, as well. And when you start criticizing other peoples' code as being "unelegant" or "unbeautiful" or "unclean", you'd better be able to explain your value system and why you judged it as so. Humility is a hard, hard path to tread, and one that I have only recently started to see the outlines of; I am guilty of just about every sin imaginable when it comes to this subject. I have created "elegant" systems that failed their original intent. I have criticized "ugly" code that, in fact, served the purpose well. I have bragged of my own accomplishments to those who accomplished a lot more than I did, or ever will. And I consider it amazing to me that my friends who've been with me since long before I started to eat my justly-deserved humble pie are still with me. (And that those friends are some amazing people in their own right.; if a man is judged by the company he keeps, then by looking around at my friends, I am judged to be a king.) I will continue to strive to be better than I am now, though, even within this discussion right now: those of you who took criticism with my post, you have good points, all of you, and I certainly don't want to stop you from continuing on your journeys of self-discovery, either.

And if we ever cross paths in person, I will buy you a beer so that we can sit down, and we can continue this discussion in person.

I don't know Heather Arthur from Eve. Never met her, never read an article by her, seen a video she's in or shot, or seen her code. Matter of fact, I don't even know that she is a "she"--I'm just guessing from the name.

But apparently she got quite an ugly reaction from a few folks when she open-sourced some code:

So I went to see what people were saying about this project. I searched Twitter and several tweets came up. One of them, I guess the original one, was basically like “hey, this is cool”, but then the rest went like this:
"I cannot even make this stuff up." --@steveklabnik
"Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse?" --@zeeg
"@steveklabnik or just point to the actual code file. eyes bleeding!" --@coreyhaines
At this point, all I know is that by creating this project I’ve done something very wrong. It seemed liked I’d done something fundamentally wrong, so stupid that it flabbergasts someone. So wrong that it doesn’t even need to be explained. And my code is so bad it makes people’s eyes bleed. So of course I start sobbing.

I'm criticizing because this is what "software craftsmanship" gets us: an imposed segregation of those who "get it" from those who "don't" based on somebody's arbitrary criteria of what we should or shouldn't be doing. And if somebody doesn't use the "right" tools or code it in the "right" way, then bam! You clearly aren't a "craftsman" (or "craftswoman"?) and you clearly don't care about your craft and you clearly aren't worth the time or energy necessary to support and nourish and grow and....

Frankly, I've not been a fan of this movement since its inception. Dave Thomas (Ruby Dave) was on a software panel with me at a No Fluff Just Stuff show about five years ago when we got on to this subject, and Dave said, point blank, "About half of the programmers in the world should just go take up farming." He paused, and in the moment that followed, I said, "Wow, Dave, way to insult half the room." He immediately pointed out that the people in the room were part of the first half, since they were at a conference, but it just sort of underscored to me how high-handed and high-minded that kind of talk and position can be.

Not all of us writing code have to be artists. Frankly, in the world of painting, there are those who will spend hours and days and months, tiny brushes in hand, jars of pigment just one lumens different from one another, laboring over the finest details, creating just one piece... and then there are those who paint houses with paint-sprayers, out of cans of mass-produced "Cream Beige" found at your local Lowes. And you know what? We need both of them.

I will now coin a term that I consider to be the opposite of "software craftsman": the "software laborer". In my younger days, believing myself to be one of those "craftsmen", a developer who knew C++ in and out, who understood memory management and pointers, who could create elegant and useful solutions in templates and classes and inheritance, I turned up my nose at those "laborers" who cranked out one crappy app after another in (what else?) Visual Basic. My app was tight, lean, and well-tuned; their apps were sloppy, bloated, and ugly. My app was a paragon of reused code; their apps were cut-and-paste cobbled-together duct-tape wonders. My app was a shining beacon on a hill for all the world to admire; their apps were mindless drones, slogging through the mud.... Yeah, OK, so you get the idea.

But the funny thing was, those "laborers" were going home at 5 every day. Me, I was staying sometimes until 9pm, wallowing in the wonderment of my code. And, I have to wonder, how much of that was actually not the wonderment of my code, but the wonderment of "me" over the wonderment of "code".

Speaking of, by the way, there appear to be the makings of another such false segregation, in the areas of "functional programming". In defense of Elliott Rusty Harold's blog the other day (which I criticized, and still stand behind, for the reasons I cited there), there are a lot of programmers that are falling into the trap of thinking that "all the cool kids are using functional programming, so if I want to be a cool kid, I have to use functional programming too, even though I'm not sure what I'm doing....". Not all the cool kids are using FP. Some aren't even using OOP. Some are just happily humming along using good ol' fashioned C. And producing some really quality stuff doing so.

See, I have to wonder just how much of the software "craftsmanship" being touted isn't really a narcissistic "Look at me, world! Look at how much better I am because I care about what I do! Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" kind of mentality. Too much of software "craftsmanship" seems to be about the "me" part of "my code". And when I think about why that is, I come to an interesting assertion: That if we take the name away from the code, and just look at the code, we can't really tell what's "elegant" code, what's "hack" code, and what was "elegant hack because there were all these other surrounding constraints outside the code". Without the context, we can't tell.

A few years after my high point as a C++ "craftsman", I was asked to do a short, one-week programming gig/assignment, and the more I looked at it, the more it screamed "VB" at me. And I discovered that what would've taken me probably a month to do in C++ was easily accomplished in a few days in VB. I remember looking at the code, and feeling this sickening, sinking sense of despair at how stupid I must've looked, crowing. VB isn't a bad language--and neither is C++. Or Java. Or C#. Or Groovy, or Scala, or Python, or, heck, just about any language you choose to name. (Except Perl. I refuse to cave on that point. Mostly for comedic effect.)

But more importantly, somebody who comes in at 9, does what they're told, leaves at 5, and never gives a rat's ass about programming except for what they need to know to get their job done, I have respect for them. Yes, some people will want to hold themselves up as "painters", and others will just show up at your house at 8 in the morning with drop cloths. Both have their place in the world. Neither should be denigrated for their choices about how they live their lives or manage their careers. (Yes, there's a question of professional ethics--I want the house painters to make sure they do a good job, too, but quality can come just as easily from the nozzle of a spray painter as it does from the tip of a paintbrush.)

I end this with one of my favorite parables from Japanese lore:

Several centuries ago, a tea master worked in the service of Lord Yamanouchi. No-one else performed the way of the tea to such perfection. The timing and the grace of his every move, from the unfurling of mat, to the setting out of the cups, and the sifting of the green leaves, was beauty itself. His master was so pleased with his servant, that he bestowed upon him the rank and robes of a Samurai warrior.

When Lord Yamanouchi travelled, he always took his tea master with him, so that others could appreciate the perfection of his art. On one occasion, he went on business to the great city of Edo, which we now know as Tokyo.

When evening fell, the tea master and his friends set out to explore the pleasure district, known as the floating world. As they turned the corner of a wooden pavement, they found themselves face to face with two Samurai warriors.

The tea master bowed, and politely step into the gutter to let the fearsome ones pass. But although one warrior went by, the other remained rooted to the spot. He stroked a long black whisker that decorated his face, gnarled by the sun, and scarred by the sword. His eyes pierced through the tea maker’s heart like an arrow.

He did not quite know what to make of the fellow who dressed like a fellow Samurai, yet who would willingly step aside into a gutter. What kind of warrior was this? He looked him up and down. Where were broad shoulders and the thick neck of a man of force and muscle? Instinct told him that this was no soldier. He was an impostor who by ignorance or impudence had donned the uniform of a Samurai. He snarled: “Tell me, oh strange one, where are you from and what is your rank?”

The tea master bowed once more. “It is my honour to serve Lord Yamanouchi and I am his master of the way of the tea.”

“A tea-sprout who dares to wear the robes of Samurai?” exclaimed the rough warrior.

The tea master’s lip trembled. He pressed his hands together and said: “My lord has honoured me with the rank of a Samurai and he requires me to wear these robes. “

The warrior stamped the ground like a raging a bull and exclaimed: “He who wears the robes of a Samurai must fight like a Samurai. I challenge you to a duel. If you die with dignity, you will bring honour to your ancestors. And if you die like a dog, at least you will be no longer insult the rank of the Samurai !”

By now, the hairs on the tea master’s neck were standing on end like the feet of a helpless centipede that has been turned upside down. He imagined he could feel that edge of the Samurai blade against his skin. He thought that his last second on earth had come.

But the corner of the street was no place for a duel with honour. Death is a serious matter, and everything has to be arranged just so. The Samurai’s friend spoke to the tea master’s friends, and gave them the time and the place for the mortal contest.

When the fierce warriors had departed, the tea master’s friends fanned his face and treated his faint nerves with smelling salts. They steadied him as they took him into a nearby place of rest and refreshment. There they assured him that there was no need to fear for his life. Each one of them would give freely of money from his own purse, and they would collect a handsome enough sum to buy the warrior off and make him forget his desire to fight a duel. And if by chance the warrior was not satisfied with the bribe, then surely Lord Yamanouchi would give generously to save his much prized master of the way of the tea.

But these generous words brought no cheer to the tea master. He thought of his family, and his ancestors, and of Lord Yamanouchi himself, and he knew that he must not bring them any reason to be ashamed of him.

“No,” he said with a firmness that surprised his friends. “I have one day and one night to learn how to die with honour, and I will do so.”

And so speaking, he got up and returned alone to the court of Lord Yamanouchi. There he found his equal in rank, the master of fencing, he was skilled as no other in the art of fighting with a sword.

“Master,” he said, when he had explained his tale, “Teach me to die like a Samurai.”

But the master of fencing was a wise man, and he had a great respect for the master of the Tea ceremony. And so he said: “I will teach you all you require, but first, I ask that you perform the way of the Tea for me one last time.”

The tea master could not refuse this request. As he performed the ceremony, all trace of fear seemed to leave his face. He was serenely concentrated on the simple but beautiful cups and pots, and the delicate aroma of the leaves. There was no room in his mind for anxiety. His thoughts were focused on the ritual.

When the ceremony was complete, the fencing master slapped his thigh and exclaimed with pleasure : “There you have it. No need to learn anything of the way of death. Your state of mind when you perform the tea ceremony is all that is required. When you see your challenger tomorrow, imagine that you are about to serve tea for him. Salute him courteously, express regret that you could not meet him sooner, take of your coat and fold it as you did just now. Wrap your head in a silken scarf and and do it with the same serenity as you dress for the tea ritual. Draw your sword, and hold it high above your head. Then close your eyes and ready yourself for combat. “

And that is exactly what the tea master did when, the following morning, at the crack of dawn he met his opponent. The Samurai warrior had been expecting a quivering wreck and he was amazed by the tea master’s presence of mind as he prepared himself for combat. The Samurai’s eyes were opened and he saw a different man altogether. He thought he must have fallen victim to some kind of trick or deception ,and now it was he who feared for his life. The warrior bowed, asked to be excused for his rude behaviour, and left the place of combat with as much speed and dignity as he could muster.

My name is Ted Neward. And I bow with respect to the "software laborers" of the world, who churn out quality code without concern for "craftsmanship", because their lives are more than just their code.

A year ago today (roughly), I gave the opening keynote at CodeMash 2.0.1.2. For those of you who were there, I don't think I need to tell you what happened. For those of you who weren't there, you probably still heard about, thanks to the Twitterstream of comments and counter-comments that followed. I've more or less tried to keep quiet about it since that time, trying to just let the furor die down (and it did, pretty quickly, I thought) out of respect to the conference organizers.

But with the show starting up again this week, and there having been a few people over the last twelve months who've asked me about "what the f*ck were you thinking" (whether that was in deliberate pun/jest or not, I can't always tell), and most importantly, now that I know that Jim and I are square with each other (thanks to a Twitter conversation a few days ago), I figure it's time to come clean and tell my side of the story.

TL;DR: If I had the chance to do the keynote over again, I'd do it differently.

(By the way, the rest of this post does have a few profanities in it, so if you're offended by that sort of thing, this is a good place to stop reading. Or, as the movies would say, this post is rated PG-13 for adult language.)

As a speaker, I have always sought to create a "persona" on stage that allowed me the maximum freedom of expression and opportunity to get my point across. A long time ago, when I started teaching at DevelopMentor, I learned from some of the best--one of those best being, of course, Don Box, but another of those was Ted Pattison. It was he who taught me that "If you can make 'em laugh, you can do whatever you want to them" (meaning the audience). He demonstrated this quite graphically by guest-lecturing in one of my classes once, early in my tenure as a DM instructor, and promptly castrated one of the students who was constantly irritating the class (and me) with off-topic questions. It was an eye-opening experience. Later, Don mentioned in passing that what we did was "equal parts education and entertainment". Education because, yes, it's what we do, but entertainment, too, because if the room falls asleep, then they're not getting educated.

And folks, I've sat in those chairs, I know how boring talks can be sometimes. And that sometimes, despite your best efforts, no matter how interesting the material, it can just be sooooo easy to pop open the laptop and do some email. Or write some code. Or even let the ambient warmth of the room in a post-lunch talk just... make... eyes... so heavy.... I get it, really.

So I decided, quite consciously, to develop a speaking persona that was a little on the edge, a little outrageous, a little "over the top", because then that persona gave me the freedom to do some of the crazy things that would keep the crowd awake and on its toes. I stand people up from the audience and use them in my demos. I write code on the fly based on their questions, and I try to use examples that allow for a certain amount of "Wow, that was weird, so I'll remember it better" in the demo itself. Case in point: when writing code to demonstrate delegates and events in C#, I would use the idea of a "Rock Band" and its fan club which, of course, must include groupies.

Is it politically correct to talk about groupies in a professional programming classroom setting? Probably not. Did anybody complain? Never heard one, directly or indirectly. Part of that, I believe, was because they got the point of the demo, and that was the point. Not that I was advocating groupie-ism, or that rock bands were more interesting than programming, but that the domain was easy enough to grip in their heads, and that made the result (loose coupling between event generators and consumers, in the case of delegates and events) more easily understood.

Analogies, for me, are never gratuitous. I choose my analogies quite carefully, and try to be very clear about where and when they do break down, because all analogies break down eventually. Even my most famous analogy breaks down, as many people have pointed out: nobody has ever died from O/R-Ms. Yep. But your wife's eyes were never burning balls of superheated plasma billions of light years away, either.

Point is, I deliberately seek ways to keep you entertained. And you know what? Entertainment often comes, in the case, from making the room laugh, and humor most often derives from the unexpected. And what's more unexpected than a profanity dropped at the most unexpected moment?

You don't have to agree with that sentiment to realize that it's FUCKING true.

When I got up to speak at CodeMash, I wanted very badly for this to be the best damn keynote I'd ever done in my life up to that point. I wanted the room to rock. Buzzing. Yes, I wanted to succeed very, very badly. It was an early-morning keynote, first one of the show. People were still milling around, there was a lot of background noise. People were still eating breakfast and waking up. And when Keith Elder, just before he introduced me to the crowd, whispered (I'm paraphrasing here) "Put some energy into this crowd, would ya?", I said to myself, "Oh, yeah. I'm on it."

A little TOO on it, as it turns out. I went way overboard. Brian Prince counted 18 f-bombs that day. Others counted, as well; lowest total I heard was 13, highest was 23. Needless to say, it was a carpet bombing to rival anything we ever did to North Vietnam. Made Dresden look like a weenie roast. (There's probably a Hiroshima joke in there too somewhere, but you get the point.)

The interesting thing about profanity used like that, however, is that it loses its efficacy. They have to be spaced out, chosen carefully, or they lose their impact. Which was, of course, exactly what happened. It's not going to have the 'unexpected' effect if it's coming every other minute or so. No matter how hard you try.

The result? Kind of predictable. Not my best results. For which I am most heartily sorry. I so wanted that keynote to go off so well, and it didn't, and I'm sorry.

For three hours after the keynote was over, as the Twitterstream was dissecting me for all that, I lay on the couch in my hotel room, bordering on tears. Seriously.

Had I the chance to do the keynote over again, you'd better damn well believe that I'd do it differently. Would I cut out all the profanity entirely? Nope. That's a part of my speaking persona, and anyone who brings me to a conference that doesn't know that probably didn't do their homework about me as a speaker beforehand. (It's not like there aren't ample opportunities to see me speaking in person, or videos of the same.) But somebody suggested not too long ago that maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to warn people ahead of time, and yep, that's a great idea. Because (and for this, I am really even more sorry) sometimes kids are in the room, such as was the case for CodeMash, and they shouldn't have to hear it unless their parents are OK with it, and I didn't give their parents (or any attendees that felt the same way) an opportunity to "opt out" if they so chose.

I could, I suppose, hide behind the excuse that "We were all adults, we should be able to handle that kind of language", but in the case of the kids, that wasn't the case. Even then, in the case of the adults, you still should be given an opportunity to opt out.

More critically, if the message got lost because of the messenger's choice of words, then I failed as a speaker. And that, my friends, is where the real frustration for me lies--not with the words I used in of themselves, but in that the message--that we as an industry have to break out of our 'box-arrow-box-arrow-cylinder' habits and modes of thinking--got lost for so many people, That is how I failed most of all, and it is on those grounds that I say, once again, I am sorry.

To you, Jim, and to the rest of the CodeMash staff, I am particularly sorry. CodeMash is your baby, and I gave it a black eye.

To the attendees of CodeMash 2.0.1.2, I am sorry if my language offended you and distracted you from the message I was trying to deliver. I hope that you were able to get past it and enjoy the rest of the show. I think a lot of you did--many came up to me afterwards, but it was such a small fraction of the total I don't want to assume anything.

Enjoy CodeMash 2.0.1.3. With any luck, I'll see you there next year: hopefully a little wiser, but still just as FUCKING outrageous as I have always been, only this time, with an up-front disclaimer.

Flame away.

F# Deep Dives, by Tomas Petricek and Phillip Trelford, Manning Publications

As many readers of my writing will already know, I've been kind of "involved" with F# (and its cousin on the JVM, Scala) for a few years now, to the degree that I and a couple of really smart guys wrote a book on the subject. Now, assuming you're one of the .NET developers who've heard of F# and functional programming, and took a gander at the syntax, and maybe even bought a book on it (my publisher and I both thank you if you bought ours), but weren't quite sure what to do with it, a book has come along to help get you past that.

As of this writing, the early-access (what Manning calls their MEAP) version had only Chapters 3 ("Parsing text-based languages") and Chapter 11 ("Creating games using XNA"), but the other topics ("Integrating external data into the F# language", "Handling dirty data with machine learning" and "Functional programming in the cloud" are just three of the other chapters listed) are juicy and meaty, and both Tomas and Philip are recognized names in the F# space. Neither are strangers to the subject material nor to writing, and the prose from the MEAP edition is pretty easy to read already, despite the fact that it's early-access material. In particular, the Markdown parser they implement in chapter 3 is a great example of a non-trivial language parser, which is not an easy task to approach but certainly a lot easier to do in a functional language. (For the record, I built a custom parser of my own for generating slides, and the blog entries that described the early implementations are here, and yes, I really should finish that series out, I know. I got more interested in extending the system, then realized I needed a full-fledged parser, and got distracted trying to integrate... surprise, surprise... Tomas' Markdown parser that he made available online.)

This book looks really promising, and I'm really hopeful Manning will send me a copy when it comes out, so I can level up my F# myself.