What are we doing here?
Fowler’s CodeAsDocumentation entry starts:
One of the common elements of agile methods is that they raise programming to a central role in software development - one much greater than the software engineering community usually does.
The overall entry is concerned with documentation, and it rings as true as most everything else I’ve read from him over the years. But what caught my attention this time is the quote above: it’s a simple and obvious statement, but it compels me to post anyway.
It seems to me that so much falls out of the primacy given (or not) to coding and the code itself, and I’m tempted to plunge into an essay on the political, historical and philosophical aspects of all this. But this is a blog entry, I’m not supposed to spend the time here.
Fowler links Jack Reeves’s essays; they’re just superb, not only for treatment of the subject, but also as a kind of memoir of trying to stimulate a debate.