Joel does not mention that Netscape code was so bad that it cost them serious credibility and customers. As a Netscape user back in the day, I did not care whether Netscape used unittests or duct tape, but I switched from Netscape to Internet Explorer because Netscape was so buggy it was painful.

Over a few years Netscape code became so unmaintainable they had to start from scratch, which cost them years. Joel wrote in another famous article that this was a major mistake. However, if the code is a giant "pragmatic" mess with no architecture and no unittests, it becomes extremely hard and dangerous to refactor.

IE also got a lot of mindshare among developers because it actually tried to implement some standards like CSS, which Netscape completely disregarded. Netscapes "pragmatic" alternative to CSS, <spacer>, <layer> and so on luckily died together with Netscape.

Many developers started making IE-only pages because it was almost impossible to get anything to work in Netscape 4. IE6 is pretty unpopular among developers today, but this is nothing compared to how the Netscape 4 generation was reviled back in the day by anyone having to develop for it.

> Remember, before you freak out, that Zawinski was at Netscape when they were changing the world. They thought that they only had a few months before someone else came along and ate their lunch

Also remember that they lost it all, and someone did eat their lunch. So maybe the their strategy should be reexamined?

Hi- Just saw this post- this is my book...

I'm finishing the last chapters this week and then there is still tons of editing ahead- The release date will be March next year!

It's going to be a FAT book with lots of games, will cover all the interesting parts of Lisp programming, including full coverage of functional programming, macros, and a lot lot more. Also, it has a zillion cartoons and illustrations.

I wanted to write a Lisp book that puts FUN first- I hope you will enjoy my book!

- Conrad Barski

If I had to rank-order the various humiliations I've seen, this comes near the top.

Microsoft: "here's our best stab at what a great browser looks like - and it took us 14 years to get here".

Google: "we've been working on a codebase for 2 years. We decided to release it as a patch to your browser. Our brief foray into this area has improved your best effort by 10x".

Ouch!

Like GetSatisfaction, stripped to its essentials this is "I have an authority domain and can rank for your brand name. Such a wonderful brand, would hate to see anything happen to it. $5,000 a year is cheap to you, isn't it?"

The point was that he exercised for 60 minutes today, instead of 30.

It's nice to see Spolsky get this enthusiastic about something other than his marketing, and I'm sure Peter Seibel agrees. But he negates his entire point at the end. After going on about how great duct tape programmers are, he says, don't think that means you can be one, because they're magic. (He says "pretty", but in this case pretty means magic.) To wit:

Duct tape programmers have to have a lot of talent to pull off this shtick.

In other words what matters is talent, not duct tape. Untalented duct tape programmers do as much damage as the untalented design-pattern programmers he scourges. So what was the point again?

Retitled: Barack Obama Loves Federal Offices

Except they only benchmarked javascript performance. V8 is only about 2 years old.

I'm a customer. it's indispensable.

You know, it is a great book and I love Jamie's interview and the "duct tape" style was used well at Netscape, but just because the guy doesn't writing unit tests or use higher-level abstractions doesn't automatically make him better than other types. Some of the smartest programmers I've met have been religious about TDD and strict formatting and commenting and as a result maintain and work on some incredibly large and complex systems.

Did those systems start out that way? Maybe not, but after a few years and a couple rewrites I'm sure they came to the same conclusion that most programmers do when they work on things for a long time: "I wish I could go back and write some tests / automate some stuff / add better debugging, etc." I know I always feel that way. I do now, after about a year and a half of hacking together our site. I'd kill for a decent test suite and fully-automated deployment. Kill!

Both styles of programming have a purpose. Maybe we'd like to avoid multi-threaded architectures, but it isn't always possible. When you have 6 weeks to launch, maybe unit tests aren't necessary, but eventually not having them will start doing more harm than good.

The more I read the writings of celebrity programmers / entrepreneurs, the more I come to realize that most of what they write reads like an attempt to justify their way of thinking as being The Right Way. Why can't we all just agree there is more than one way to skin a cat and each probably has an applicable use case or two?

"After he jumped that shark I don't read anything he writes anymore."

...how'd you get that quote then? Or did you only read enough to get something to complain about?

Microsoft has no lack of talented engineers, what they do lack is vision.

"I'd kill for a decent test suite and fully-automated deployment. Kill!"

Then why don't you write one? I suspect you don't have the time - well back then when you created the system, you did not have the time either. So the bottom line again seems to be: it is not actually THAT important. Otherwise you would make the time.

You know what's really cool about this? Microsoft and Apple have both taken stabs at this problem multiple times. The companies that make the operating systems on about 99% of PCs have both tried this. They've had some success at it, but it's never been a killer app or a feature that people rave about.

Knowing that, dhouston still created DropBox. He did a fantastic job. He knocked it out of the park. Now 2 million people have used the thing and he's well on his way to building a very successful business with it.

Don't let the big guys scare you.

This is misleading. Webkit, the core component of Chrome, has been worked on for far more than 2 years.

"Vision" isn't an easily defined quantity. What MS lacks is incentive to make a browser with fast JavaScript performance, as they make most of their money off desktop apps, many of which web-based apps are looking to replace.

So actually, the opposite is true: MS has a big economic incentive to slow down JS performance in browsers, because it will make them more money selling desktop softare. One way to do this is to release new versions of IE which have slow JS interpreters, and use marketing to convince enterprise customers that the new browsers are super-duper top-of-the-line shiny things, with features like security and easy maintainability.