The Mathematical Hacker
I'm in the Yegge school, so far as I think that the mathematical ignorance and, more generally, anti-intellectualism of our industry is its downfall. We see it in the lack of design sense and the awful code that is produced. VisitorFactory nonsense is something that was invented by people who hated math and wanted to tear programming away from its mathematical/problem-solving roots with a bunch of junk complexity that adds nothing.<p>If you're doing simple things over and over, with the objective function being minimal rejection/loss rate, the anti-intellectual/industrial get-your-boss-off-your-back-oriented development works. Complex work is different. You need to invest a lot of additional energy into elegance and quality that most companies won't pay for.<p>However, what we do is so <i>intensely</i> collaborative if it's done right that we are <i>teachers</i> more than anything else. Not <i>engineers</i> or <i>programmers</i>. Our job doesn't end when we build the thing: we have to teach people how to use it, so that it's not mindless complexity being inflicted upon them (as is true of many enterprise products) but something that actually makes their lives better (most software doesn't, because bosses have a tendency to force people to use bad software and this makes engineers' lives, and thus products, worse). It's sad to me that this is an extreme minority viewpoint, and that almost no software manager on earth will actually <i>pay</i> for things to be this way.