Pervasive Code

To: pontin@nytimes.com

Regarding your article “Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software”:

Your ignorance of the reality of software development would be excusable if not for the fact that your CV suggests that you should know better. Your defamatory description of programmers smears an entire industry of individuals with a single, pejorative stereotype.
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I’m working on a new project which I regard as medium-large in scope, and I’ve decided to use BDUF instead of RAD on it. This is of course heresy in light of the effect XP and Ruby on Rails have had on the web startup zeitgeist. (”Isn’t it all about RAD these days?”) But I still think I’m making the right call here.
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I’ve been reading about PostgreSQL. I like what I see, a lot.

I’m a database weenie, which is unusual among application developers from what I’ve seen. I’ve found that almost universally, application developers don’t understand transactions, don’t understand basic data modeling rules, and generally regard RDBMSs as a pain in the butt, to be marginalized as much as possible.
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Joel Spolsky does a good job of describing why “there is no silver bullet” is true.

I’m working on wireframes for a startup company, and I’m using the excellent OmniGraffle Pro to do it. Of course I’m keeping all my artifacts in Subversion. But there’s a problem: OmniGraffle sometimes changes a file’s format from a single flat file to a “bundle”, which is a directory that Mac OS X pretends is a single entity (as is seen with all the .app bundles in the /Applications directory). OmniGraffle bundles contain a file with a hideously awful filename, which I’ve seen in the old Classic MacOS if I remember correctly: Icon^M. Like, 5 characters, 5th is a carriage return. Subversion can’t check it in, svn:ignore can’t ignore it. Ugh. Here’s the fix: Using OmniGraffle with Subversion without Sadness