Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets

Re:Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets by scarface74 on Friday October 06, 2017 @08:03AM (#15416083)

In fairness, Joel Spolsky has done a lot of great work as a founder - founding Stack Exchange being the most notable — but is any of his personal work open source? We don’t know how well written his code is. Twitter is successful but their code has reputation for being horrible.

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Re:Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets by chrisseaton on Friday October 06, 2017 @08:05AM (#15416096)

It's not open source, but he led Excel development didn't he? I can use that and appreciate that it's good quality software so I want to hear about how he managed that.

I don't know if I'm just ignorant, but to be honest I have no idea if people like Martin and Fowler can program at all or not!

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Re:Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets by tptacek on Friday October 06, 2017 @08:52AM (#15416387)

No, Spolsky didn't lead Excel development. He was a PM.

I happen to like Spolsky a lot but most of the career success we've actually seen from him is managerial, which is not unimportant, but it's not the same as being a dev lead on Excel.

On the other hand, Spolsky's programming advice is much more broad-spectrum and rooted in common sense. I'm not sure you've ever seen Spolsky dismiss a whole category of languages or correctness tools, for instance.

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Re:Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets by chrisseaton on Friday October 06, 2017 @10:47AM (#15417170)

Isn't the PM the one who leads project? (I don't work in a team that uses these terms so genuinely asking.)

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Re:Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets by tptacek on Friday October 06, 2017 @10:54AM (#15417231)

A product manager generally owns the spec for a product, but doesn't lead development of it.

(Microsoft has a more complicated PM scheme with I think two different kinds of PMs? So I can't speak to exactly what Spolsky's role was there. It wasn't a small role, but no, I don't think he led Excel development.)

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Re:Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets by lmkg on Friday October 06, 2017 @11:49AM (#15417729)

Spolsky's role is addressed in his blog post about The Time That Bill Gates Reviewed His Work. It's an interesting read itself, I recommend it.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

tl;dr He wrote the spec for VBA, aka Excel Macros. It's not being in charge of all of Excel, but I would call that a pretty substantial contribution.

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Re:Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets by tptacek on Friday October 06, 2017 @11:54AM (#15417779)

It is definitely not my point that Spolsky's role with Excel was unimportant. Hopefully, none of my comments can be taken as minimizing his role at all. I'm just saying he wasn't an Excel dev lead, which is a distinction that is relevant to this thread.

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Re:Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets by Cthulhu_ on Friday October 06, 2017 @08:25AM (#15416226)

Fowler in specific definitely knows a lot about the process of software development though, I mean he's written multiple books on the craftsmanship of software development. Practical advice which a lot of people can see the value of.

Bob is more of a theoretical, philosophical guy it seems.

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