Martian Headsets

joelonsoftware.com

2 pointsdbxz3 comments

Joel Spoelsky is one of the greatest software writers of our time. This needs to be made required reading in every software engineering course.

I tend to be leery of any claims like this. It would be nice to be able to pump infinite knowledge into students in one course, but that's not realistic.

The implicit claim behind such a statement is: X should be a topic covered in all software engineering courses, and Y is the best explanation of it. And that is a statement quite easy to punch holes in, regardless of how much you like Y.

In this case: most intro SE courses need to teach things like good commenting and committing practice. Anything architectural is beyond most undergrads.

I think the main lesson here is something other than what Joel intended. He meant it as a defense of why IE had been breaking standards. I see it as a lucid explanation of the constraints that protocols place on software, and a reminder that the care needed to design them is usually mich higher than what's put in.

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