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KentBeck
2,471karma·231submissions·April 6, 2009
about
Kent Beck is a programmer, author, artist, father, and singing guitarist.
recent activity (231 total)
2 pts
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You're right that frequent commits greatly simplifies the particular problem of undetected errors in big refactorings. However, people being people, the sunk cost fallacy is still an issue in developm…
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The good news about psychology is that a counterexample does not invalidate the thesis the way it does in math.
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AFAIK the correlation is anecdotal and no more. However, I've had enough bar discussions of "why do musical and programming accomplishment go together" that I was glad to find an answer that made sens…
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I've certainly seen that kind of argument. What makes me think I haven't fallen into that fallacy (although it is a possibility) is that I freely admit that I'm terrible at lots of things (like readin…
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That's certainly a possibility, that programming accomplishment and musical accomplishment don't correlate at all and it's just sampling error. However, I experience both and I was trying to identify …
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Towle_, Thank you for the followup. I'm not trying to do science here, just understand my own experience. Regarding the correlation between musicians and programmers being the result of socioeconomic …
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What you are calling "awareness" sounds like what I mean by pattern matching. When I'm "on" as a musician, this "pattern matching" operates on a variety of time scales--multiple concerts, this concert…
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No, I haven't. I heard an interview with him, though, that makes me think we're thinking about similar ideas.
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What I noticed is that 1) some people are better at matching patterns than others, 2) there are different kinds of patterns (social, symbolic, spatial, etc.), and 3) some people have a particularly ef…
46 pts
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Establishing a rhythm helps. Make a cup of tea every time you sit down to work. Light a candle. Turn on a certain style of music. Me I like juggling as a warm up.
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Whether a CLI will beat a GUI depends on whether the operations are at the right level of abstraction. When watching Gary Bernhardt's refactoring session, he was using text editing operations to refac…
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10ren, It's good to hear cottage industries still exist on the Internet, as that's what I hope to build. I agree that PFA is too negative. I tried to find a positive formulation but couldn't find one …
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10ren, I don't understand the exception you are proposing. If the "crucial problem" is several steps in, then your first several MVPs succeed easily (indeed, that is the case for Tattlebird). Any succ…
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I think quite a bit has been written about 3M's innovation approach, which as I mentioned is quite similar to what I'm proposing.