You should definitely read his other articles. He is a talented writer who knows his subject matter as well. I will never forget this paragraph,
"Me. I’m a professional programmer. By which I mean to say, I shovel through piles of virtual shit for a living. And to shovel quickly and happily, I need a big shovel. Python is one of my shovels. Core dumps are one of my piles of shit. Python, meet the core dumps. Core dumps, meet the Python."
"A person who was exposed to machines and doesn’t hate them is either an idiot or is completely devoid of soul! Step back, the child of Satan!"
"But you already got it - I don’t want your code, because I’m an antisocial asshole that has no team spirit whatsoever. I’m going to parse arguments using 5 lines of C code. Worse, I’ll make a function out of those five lines, prefix its name with the module name, and replicate it in all my modules."
"I don’t want to depend on anything without an owner. [...] not only do I want to depend on stuff with an owner, but I require a happy owner at that. Contrary to a common managerial assumption (one of those which rarely hold but do keep managers sane), I don’t believe in forcibly assigning ownership. If the owner doesn’t like the module, expect some pretty lousy gardening job."
"Code is more like poetry: change this line, and now the next line doesn’t rhyme, or you’ve broken the rhythm, or you’ve put angry words into a happy poem, that sort of trouble. Which is one reason to like code ownership."
Amazing.
Wow. Never seen this blog before. I've spent some time reading his blog today, and nearly everything he writes resonates with me. Thanks for the suggestion.
Another bit: "This nip/tuck business in the code? Rather than a reference to the drama series on plastic surgery, these are names of Forth stack manipulation words."
Nice writing.