Two Schools

There always seem to be two schools in software, though exactly where the gates are varies. Alan Kay described how Edsger Dijkstra noticed that “the Atlantic has two sides”.

It was basically all about how different the approaches to computing science were in Europe, especially in Holland and in the United States. In the US, here, we were not mathematical enough, and gee, in Holland, if you’re a full professor, you’re actually appointed by the Queen, and there are many other uh important distinctions made between the two cultures. So, uhm, I wrote a rebuttal paper, just called On the fact that most of the software in the world is written on one side of the Atlantic.

Or maybe both schools are on the same continent.

The essence of [the MIT/Stanford approach] can be captured by the phrase the right thing. […] The worse-is-better philosophy is only slightly different […] and I will call the use of this design strategy the New Jersey approach.

Or they could be ways of thinking, school curricula, or whatever.

Maybe both schools have something to teach us. Maybe it’s the same thing.