There's No Such Thing As A Duct Tape Programmer

There's No Such Thing As A Duct Tape Programmer Edit | Delete | Posted by Kevin Pang on 10/26/2009 | Comment Comments (0) About a month ago, Joel Spolsky had the software developer community up in arms over his article, "The Duct Tape Programmer". Everyone with a blog felt compelled to throw in their knee-jerk response, faithfully declaring their allegiance to either Joel and the duct tape crowd or the do-it-right crowd. And as so frequently happens on the internet, the whole argument degenerated into an enormous straw man fight. Duct tape programmers complained about how endlessly debating best practices and writing unit tests doesn't get anything done, while do-it-right programmers argued that poor design leads to maintenance nightmares down the line. Both assertions are correct of course, but they miss out on one key point: there's no such thing as a duct tape programmer.