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Rise of the Shaman Programmer
- oldmancoyote 9y agoIt's good to draw attention to this, but is it new? Newton said "We stand on the shoulders of giants." The potential(actual?) problem with this is it can necessitate crippling specialization. Who maintains an overview? Who directs goals and avoids harmful drift is the overall direction? Maintaining the overview is perfectly practical, but who does it, what is their motivation, and how is it legitimized?
- PaulHoule 9y agoPersonally how much I understand the system I am working on is a function of myself and the system at that point in time. Sometimes I have been new to a system and had to fix a problem in a hurry and had an incomplete understanding. Sometimes six months later I understand what really went wrong. Years ago there was a bug in the Linux 2.4 kernel that I understood so far as "sometimes there is a null pointer in this particular place" and was able to make a patch that mitigated the effect of the null pointer. I never understood why there was a null pointer in that place and it wasn't worth doing because Linux 2.4 was hopelessly broken.