Software Development: It's a Religion

Coding Horror: Software Development: It's a Religion:

"But software development is, and has always been, a religion. We band together into groups of people who believe the same things, with very little basis for proving any of those beliefs. Java versus .NET. Microsoft versus Google. Static languages versus Dynamic languages. We may kid ourselves into believing we're 'computer scientists', but when was the last time you used a hypothesis and a control to prove anything? We're too busy solving customer problems in our chosen tool, unbeliever!"

To the list above, we could easily add agile vs. non-agile development process , object-oriented vs. non-object-oriented, etc. Does refactoring code actually improve anything? Is the waterfall process truly abysmal? This was precisely what Paul Adamczyk talked about the other day when he substituted for Prof. Johnson. How much of software development can we actually prove as being more effective? Why do people flock to Process X instead of Process Y? And then why do the people in X flock to W when it comes out?

So why do people do research in software engineering? Well, like religion it's an interesting field. You never know when you will become an apostate your faith. Or how long you will hold on to your dying sect. And on the day of judgment (the release date for software developers) you will truly find out if your God has abandoned you.

Blaine Buxton: Positronic Vibrations:

"As long as the people who have big checks are running on the CLR and JVM Ruby will have to crossover to those platforms to succeed. Business and economics were the downfall of Smalltalk, not natural selection. The 'arrogance of the smalltalk communities sealed the lid'."

As long as everyone plays nice together, all software development techniques, methodologies, tools can coexist together. Hopefully. Passion for something is good but over-zealousness is just plain unhealthy.

For all we know, software engineering might just be the answer we need to life, the universe and everything.