Is Programming A Craft ?

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Little long but quite a thought provoking article on whether Software Programming is a craft?  I totally love the full post and couldn’t agree more but here are a few excerpts from the post that stand out.

The thing is, at one level software can be described by the utility it provides. It doesn’t matter how ugly it is under the hood as long as it delivers the goods. A programmer can show beautiful software to another programmer, but that’s where the appreciation stops for software per se.

A really great programmer (and I’ve been lucky enough to work with a handful over the years) can out-perform a doing-it-for-the-money programmer by orders of literally hundreds, delivering in hours or days what would take an average developer weeks or months.

A truly skilled programming team can deliver amazing business results in insanely short amounts of time. Let’s go after some of that! I want your experience. I want your knowledge. I want you to show me “the simplicity the other side of complexity,” to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes. It takes a real expert – a real craftsman – to see the elegant simplicity buried away inside the mess we call enterprise software, for instance, and tease it out

 Source : http://dannorth.net/2011/01/11/programming-is-not-a-craft/

On a related note, here is one the best quotes on Software I have ever come to know of.

Software is invisible to most of the world. Although individuals, organizations, and nations rely on a multitude of software-intensive systems every day, most software lives in the interstitial spaces of society, hidden from view except insofar as it does something tangible or useful. 

The primary challenge of every software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity in the face of essential complexity.

-- Grady Booch ( Handbook of Software Architecture – Grady Booch )

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