” Seibel: Overengineering seems to be a pet peeve of yours. Zawinski: Yeah. At the end of the day, ship the fucking thing! It’s great to rewrite your code and make it cleaner and by the third time it’ll actually be pretty. But that’s not the point—you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products.
Zawinski: I know it’s kind of a cliché but it comes back to worse is better. If you spend the time to build the perfect framework that’s going to do what you want and that’s going to carry you from release 1.0 through release 5.0 and everything’s going to be great; well guess what: release 1.0 is going to take you three years to ship and your competitor is going to ship their 1.0 in six months and now you’re out of the game. You never shipped your 1.0 because someone else ate your lunch. Your competitor’s six-month 1.0 has crap code and they’re going to have to rewrite it in two years but, guess what: they can rewrite it because you don’t have a job anymore.
Zawinski: Well, definitely not a scientist or engineer because those have very formal connotations. I don’t do a lot of math; I don’t draw blueprints; I don’t prove things. I guess somewhere between craftsman and artist, depending on what the project is.
Then there was another book that everybody thought was the greatest thing ever in that same period—Design Patterns—which I just thought was crap. It was just like, programming via cut and paste. Rather than thinking through your task you looked through the recipe book and found something that maybe, kinda, sorta felt like it, and then just aped it. That’s not programming; that’s a coloring book. But a lot of people seemed to love it. Then in meetings they’d be tossing around all this terminology they got out of that book. Like, the inverse, reverse, double-back-flip pattern—whatever. Oh, you mean a loop? OK.
Crockford: I’ve had companies where there was an antagonism between the development teams and the testing teams, which I thought was extremely unhealthy. There was this theory that you keep the two separate and one would rat out the other, basically. And I just think it’s a horrible model.
Crockford: I think of myself as a writer. Sometimes I write in English and sometimes I write in JavaScript.
As they say, it’s easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code.
There’s a brilliant quote by Tony Hoare in his Turing Award speech about how there are two ways to design a system: “One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”
You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.