When I originally wrote down Blodgett's First Law of Software Development, I also wrote down, stream-of-consciousness style, a bunch of related thoughts as they came to me. Here they are in all their raw, rambling, pretentious glory:
- Any step in a process that could be automated must be automated.
- Any code that could be generated must be generated.
- A good developer has a built-in tedium detector that's extremely sensitive.
- Great developers feel a moral obligation to eliminate tedium.
- Tedium indicates a flaw in your process.
- A good developer will refuse to do boring work.
- A good developer is lazy.
- It's foolish to force your best developers to do boring work.
- Prefer unit tests over comments.
- Dynamic languages will eventually win.
- Ruby on Rails is popular because it ruthlessly eliminates tedium from web development.
- "Don't Repeat Yourself" might be the most important and fundamental principle in software development.
2 comments :
Following the logic, you are implying Ruby on Rails developers are great developers? Maybe if great developers were forced to use it but that breaks one of the corollaries.
No, I'm not implying that. Certainly there were many developers who were drawn to Ruby on Rails because of its trendiness. But I would like to think that its original appeal was due to the fact that it ruthlessly eliminated the tedium that was inherent in other web frameworks.
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