Dreaming in Code

I've always been interested in books that tell the story if creation from the inside, and particularly when they related to software. I remember being very impressed by Tracy Kidder's The Soul Of A New Machine when I read it way back at university, and another of Kidder's works, House. This week I finished another book in the same tradition, Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg.

"Dreaming in Code" recounts the development of Chandler, an open source personal information manager (PIM) that's now been in development for four years. I have to admit that when I saw the project start date, I assumed that the book documented a rise and fall, and I was really surprised to find out that the project was still in development, but without a widely used release, after all this time. It's not really important though. "Dreaming In Code" is a journey, not a destination, and it was revealing to see that developers with great pedigrees have the same problems that I do on my projects.

There were a few quotes along the way that should have been worth saving, but in the end I'm left with these:

"People write programs. That statement is worth pausing over. People write programs. Despite the field's infatuation with metaphors like architecture and bridge-building and its dabbling in alternative models from biology or physics, the act of programming today remains an act of writing - of typing character after character, word after word, line after line. Tools that let programmers create software by manipulating icons and graphics shapes on screen have a long and sometimes successful history... But these have generally served as layers of shortcuts on top of the same old text0based code, and sooner or later, to fix any really hard problems, the programmer would end up elbow-deep in that code anyway.

People write programs

...Is programming a kind of creative writing? The notion seems outlandish at first blush. Any discipline that involves complex mathematics and symbolic logic does not seem to share the same cubbyhole with poetry and self-expression. Yet the programming field could learn much from the writing world, argues Richard Gabriel, a veteran of Lisp and object-oriented programming who is now a Distinguished Engineer at Sun. 'My view is that we should train developers the way we train creative people like poets and artists. People may say, "Wall, that sounds really nuts." But what do people do when they're being trained, for example, to get a master of fine arts in poetry? They study great works of poetry. Do we do that in out software engineering disciplines? No. You don't look at the source code for great pieces of software. Or look at the architecture of great pieces of software. You don't look at their design. You don't study the lives of great software designers. So you don't study the literature of the thing you're trying to build.'"

And Rosenberg's Law:

"Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new"

with it's corollary,

"The only software that's worth making is software that does something new."