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Ask HN: Hackers - mediocre programmers?

2 points by krmboya ↗ HN
My software Engineering lecturer was taking us through some types of Software Engineering methodologies. On one end of the spectrum was the Milestone plan-driven model, and the on the other were the Hackers. He told us that hackers produce crappy software with no documentation whatsoever, while I believe its the opposite case(Linux, the Internet etc ) How would you explain to such a person who hackers really are, and what they do?

3 comments

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mfukar
What is "crappy software"? Is it certain that hackers, per your lecturer's definition, produce no documentation? What is the criteria for ranking software produced by people following certain processes? How do you pretend to isolate those from other factors in the process of writing software?

Software development methodologies are just processes, followed by people (yes, programmers are people too). You can't enforce them rigorously and you will deviate; dev teams under the milestone plan-driven model will produce some pretty horrible code (I wish I could showcase some), and hackers will in fact write some pretty neat documentation.

I'd expect a lecturer to have the wisdom to stay away from blindly labeling and generalizing in such a crude fashion. Yeah, I'd tell him that as well. :-)

gaius
You should look up the case of Torvalds vs Tanenbaum.
jpr
"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."."

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EW...