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Discussion on: What are your favorite analogies to explain programming?

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almostconverge profile image
Peter Ellis • Edited

Of course everybody approaches it differently and they can all work just fine.

I like to think of myself as a developer as an artisan: like a blacksmith or a cabinet maker.

I'm not an artist, I'm not building sonething that exoresses an idea or feeling but something that works. Of course that doesn't mean it can't be pretty, elegant or richly decorated, but it has to be a working item.

We all may have your own personal style but we're all working with the same basic techniques and it's important that they're compatible and reproducible.

We know where our materials come from and how they behave.

And we love our tools, sometimes building our own.

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almostconverge profile image
Peter Ellis

The only ones I strongly disagree with are "Guru" and "Rock Star".

They send out all the wrong messages for me.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Yes, and that's because programming is a team sport, not a star system.

This is why the metaphor from Scrum makes much more sense :

A team of rugby players with different skills that shares a common goal, take hints from a coach, but otherwise self organise when it plays together on the field.