Back then, there were no blogs. There were no programmers who wrote stuff. Joel was pretty much the first. And his stuff was really good and actionable.

So if you cared to read about your field, you were reading Joel. If you sent a programming link to your team, chances are it was one of his articles.

Coming into the field today, it's understandable that you might not have heard of the guy. But if you were around in the late 90s and you'd heard of anybody, you'd heard of Joel. If you were on a team in the late 90s and you wanted to improve things, you sent around a copy of the Joel test.

So yes, I do think a lot of the credit for the higher standards we have today goes to him.

http://web.archive.org/web/19981206053731/http://www.randomh...

I was inspired by Scripting News, which had been discussing programming for quite a while at that point.

But you're right about the 90s. They were a disgusting decade in a lot of ways. The reasonably _good_ development shops of the 90s looked like the horrible shops of today. I worked at a couple of top-flight Common Lisp companies in those years, and they had (1) incomplete, token test suites with dozens of "expected" failures, (2) release cycles of a year or more, (3) independently written modules with "big bang" integration a couple of times per year, and (4) version control systems ranging from CVS (on a very good day indeed) to vile, in-house horrors written in Perl 4. But when I talked to other programmers, nearly all of them worked in much worse environments.

The early days of the XP movement were a revelation for me: You could test _everything_. You didn't have to get the design right up front. Instead, you could rely on your unit tests to help you refactor your code. You could work in 2-week release cycles and pull your features from a constantly-changing priority queue. This, of course, all seems completely obvious today, and not even particularly "agile".

Starting around 2000, Joel wrote his short, funny essays. The biggest advantage of Joel on Software wasn't that his ideas were new, but that he communicated them well enough for managers to understand. And I stopped a few bad decisions in my day by sending those essays around. So while I agree his writing was influential, I don't think he deserves _quite_ the central importance you give him.

I think this is where it fails - most people don't read about their field, at all. At least in my experience.

I was only programming professionally in 2004, though, for what it's worth.