'use strict' and cargo cult programming

I've just read  mjd's confession "Why I Hate strict", it is from 2003 so he might have changed his views now, but there is nothing that would indicate that on this web page.  Anyway, his main argument that the usual advice to use strict is automatic and mindless  and that it often does not really prevent the problems that people think it does.  In other words it is a cargo cult programming to which he contrast programming with thinking and deep analysis of everything you do.

I used to program without use strict; use warnings but after exposure to the usual propaganda I switched and I found that the cost of mindlessly adding it is negligible, the cases where I need no strict are very rare, and there are many benefits of doing it, especially when working with old code.  This cult is rather effective in luring the cargo planes to land in my atoll.  On the other hand I am all for deep analysis and checking your assumptions from time to time.  There are many valid points in Marc Lehman common::sense and I would like to see them discussed.  While we are on the road to have use strict by default we might also try to make it better.

$ primes for money

The thesis above sounds uncontroversial.  It is also rather uncontroversial that '$' is relatively frequently used when programming in Perl.  Now - what can be the consequences of that?

Money has been said to change people's motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance.

from one of the first links in the query above.  Pretty sad - can that apply to the Perl community? Another link from that list, an entertaining BBC video report suggests also some other effects: hunger and pain insensitivity.

Thesis: simple - antythesis: easy - synthesis: ...

Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy is a great talk, a must see, with lot's of insight, but together with that it also misrepresents what Agile is about.  Hickey's main point is that we should try to write simple software, because this is the only way to have reliable software, and he is right of course.   He notes that when you encounter a new bug and try to fix it - all the existing tests pass - so they will not help you in finding the cause of it.  You need to do the bug analysis on your own  and the complexity of your code is your enemy there.  He is also right when he talks about how easy means familiar a not simple and that it is a trap because it drives us away from the other (in small increments I would add).  He is insightful when he talks about things that are source of complexity.   He is funny, but missing the point in his critique of Agile.

The development sprints he attacks are not about doing the bulk of the work - they are about building a prototype on which we can test our assumptions.  Without the understanding that we get from these prototypes we could simplify as much as we want but it would not change the fact that our solution solves the wrong problem.  Agile is not an enemy of simple, it puts a lot of weight to doing the easy - but not because this is the goal - rather it uses easy as a mean to get to the correct. Agile is the answer to the paradox that we don't know what we should make until we already have a prototype of that thing.  I wish more developers cared about simple - but only after they know what is needed.

Notes on the Synthesis of Form

According to Wikipedia the origin of  Design Patterns lays in the Pattern Language ideas by the unorthodox architect and philosopher Christopher Alexander, but his earlier work also used to be widely read by computer scientists:

Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form was required reading for researchers in computer science throughout the 1960s. It had an influence^[8] in the 1960s and 1970s on programming language design, modular programming, object-oriented programming, software engineering and other design methodologies. Alexander's mathematical concepts and orientation were similar to Edsger Dijkstra's influential A Discipline of Programming.

The solution to the design problem that he proposes there does not look too attractive now, but his models, his metaphors, his insight into the design process - it's all still relevant and spot on.  I am surprised that the Agile movement does not quote "Notes" as one of their foundation texts.