I know you read about Ad Hominem Arguments on several Important Internet Web Guides To Arguing, but in the real world the credibility and authority of an author does bear on their persuasive power.

If Michael Arrington, Steve Ballmer, or Ashton Kutcher wrote an article about "duct tape programming", you'd have no trouble recognizing the dissonance. You only have trouble with it here because it hits close to home: you don't yourself want to be disqualified from the discussion. Which, nobody is going to do that, so relax.

Besides, fully expecting at least 2 HN'ers to jump out from the bushes shouting "ad hominem!", I made some effort to keep my criticism relevant: it's not that he hasn't shipped real product, it's that he has a bio that makes it clear (to me) that he doesn't think shipping is as important as methodology.

While you guys sort out whether the source of information should matter vs does it matter to us humans, it should be pointed out that the article itself endorses a quote which hits out against Spolsky for being a "bug tracking system salesman".

Although, I'm writing enterprise code in MS technologies all day long so I'm clearly not to be trusted.

But that quote was, at least, funny!

> If Michael Arrington, Steve Ballmer, or Ashton Kutcher wrote an article about "duct tape programming", you'd have no trouble recognizing the dissonance.

I suspect that Ballmer is reasonably good at recognizing programmers who ship. He may not know why the things that he triggers on matter, but he's had lots of opportunities to discover such triggers.