Programming in isolation
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-12-11 08:12:56 - Graham EllisSince I got up this morning, I've been writing some thoughts / guidance on Perl standards (expect some much fuller links elsewhere on this website by the end of the weekend [update - see Perl Standards]). I've just come to a section where I'm saying "it's not just you as the coder - think of the user, the administrator, the maintainer and the tester too". This lead me back to thinking about a post I spotted earlier in the week (elsewhwere):
My name is Xxxxxxxx. I am citizen of ... I live in Townname, SN. I have just joined today. I am a uni professor. I am halfway through my Ph.D. I am very interested in spending some time in England ... I would like to know ... I want to ... I was wondering if it is true that ... I also wanted to know if there were any special considerations .... I ...
To protect privacy and copyright, and to prevent reader boredom, original post has been truncated but I have included EVERY SINGLE sentence start. Was is just me, or would you be put off by having every sentence start with "I". Does it show a certain - err - selfcentereddness? I wondered if the posting was a troll, but I came to the conclusion that it was probably a genuine post, written by someone who was rather inward looking to themself. It was agreeably surprising to find this morning, after a lot of thoughful follow ups, that the original poster had followed up with a one line reply. It started with "Thank you ..." which is much better ...
As programmers, it's very easy to get lost in looking inward at the software we're writing and not consider the wider picture of why we're writing it, for whom, and will be effected by the software though its life. We should think of all these other parties involved and, just once in a while, we'll get a pleasant surprise as we get more feedback and appreciation than we expected from the most unlikely source!