Program, CTM!

You’ll say: “Eduardo, you obviously love writing, that must be your true passion.” And the truth is you’re not that far off: I like writing, and preparing these posts is one of the most fun things I do, but no, I have a greater passion than writing: programming. It really is what I like most. I don’t think I’m a great programmer, but I think I’m above average, and the best part is that I keep learning, every day.

Not long ago a colleague told me she had met a young man who was studying “computer engineering”. Someone said to him: “how great that you’re studying that, you could work with us to finish the applications we need!”, and the young man’s proud answer was: “no, no! I don’t get my hands dirty anymore!”.

Well, that is what’s wrong with our industry, that damned attitude of “not wanting to get your hands dirty”, as if they would actually get dirty (there are products for cleaning keyboards, did you know?).

We are software developers, what we do is program! I’m in an executive position and, even though the “dignity of the office” says I shouldn’t, “I still get my hands dirty!”.

It’s like telling me that a neurosurgeon who studied for 10 years doesn’t operate! Or that a soccer player doesn’t use his feet!

The great Edsger W. Dijkstra said it clearly:

As economics is known as “The Miserable Science”, software engineering should be known as “The Doomed Discipline”, doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter “How to program if you cannot.”

What happens is that there are a lot of people who are incapable of programming, and so they drift into software engineering, because they believe that makes up for their ineptitude, and that is how the industry has filled up with inept people. And that’s why there is a software crisis, and projects don’t ship, because the few people who are good end up subsidizing the bad ones. We have built our crisis by being nice people.

Enough of that! Let’s stop accepting mediocrity, ineptitude and incompetence. Let’s start with the hiring process: if you need jugglers, ask them to juggle in front of you before hiring them.

The other thing is methodologies. Take the example of Waterfall: for years this method has been taught as the traditional way to develop software, when in fact the paper that introduces it says you should not use this approach, because it doesn’t work. Most software engineering books are based on a reading comprehension error!

And against this “methodology” the “new methodologies” get proposed. And then come endless “software engineering” discussions, which keep forgetting the essential point, that the only way to develop software is by programming, ctm! (*)

So it’s inevitable that some programmers rebel and write their own manifesto against all the previous manifestos, like this one: Programming, Motherfucker, which basically has the same attitude we want to convey when we say ¡Programa CTM! (*)

This comes from a Manifesto written by Zed Shaw, a programmer and musician, creator of the Mongrel web server for Ruby. A controversial character, with a pretty cool website :smile: ¹

Very much in his style, Zed Shaw writes:

“We are tired of XP, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, Software Craftsmanship (aka XP-Lite) and anything else getting in the way of…Programming, Motherfucker.”

“We are tired of being told we’re autistic idiots who need to be manipulated to work in a Forced Pair Programming chain gang without any time to be creative because none of the 10 managers on the project can do… Programming, Motherfucker.”

The following is Shaw’s counterproposal to the values of the agile manifesto:

They Claim To Value
They Really Value
We Fucking Do

Individuals and interactions

Tons of billable hours

Programming, Motherfucker

Working software

Tons of pointless tests

Programming, Motherfucker

Customer collaboration

Bleeding clients dry

Programming, Motherfucker

Responding to change

Instability and plausible deniability

Programming, Motherfucker

I don’t know about you, but I like that attitude. I might just end up buying one of his t-shirts...

Notes

The coprolalia, or foul and obscene language, used in this post is for academic purposes only, ahem.

(*) The acronym CTM stands for a profanity widely used in Chile and also in Peru: “Concha de Tu Madre”, or “conchetumadre” or “conchetumare”. An equivalent, though I suspect it isn’t used the same way in Mexico, would be “Chinga Tu Madre”, which has the same initials. It has become popular on Twitter in expressions like “Está temblando CTM!!” (it’s an earthquake, CTM!!) or “Gooool CTM!”, so the expression has many uses: to express fear or rage, to threaten or to insult. I imagine it fits the Manifesto’s use of motherfucker quite well.