The new release of Appropriate Behaviour—the book about things programmers should do that aren’t programming—is now up. The most obvious, and most awesome, change in this update is a fabulous new cover, designed by Sebastian Hermida of leanpubcovers.com. Should you be in the market for a cover page, I’d strongly recommend him.
Other changes in this release include additions to the (ends of the) chapters on coding practices and learning, and I’ve added part of a new chapter on requirements engineering. As ever, discussion of the book is welcome in its glassboard, details of which are in the introduction.
I’ve found it really interesting in researching this book that I can go back decades and find information that has either been forgotten, or was seemingly ignored even at the time of publication. I think it’s quite clear that there’s a gulf between software as practiced by people who make software, and software as researched by academics; it’s therefore not surprising to see journal articles that apparently never got read by commercial sector developers.
What is more interesting is the extent to which “mainstream” programming books, including ones that apparently made a big splash at the time of their publication, no longer seem relevant. They’ve either been completely dropped from our consciousness (hands up everyone who’s read Peopleware in the last five years), or have been adapted into a one-sentence précis that’s become part of the mythology of programming. A thought experiment by way of an example of this mythologising: quote any sentence from The Mythical Man Month except the one about adding people to a late project. What was the rest of the book about? Is anything else in it relevant to what we do today? Do we know that even that sentence is relevant, or does it just sound plausible?
I’ve been having lots of fun discovering these forgotten entries in our history and bringing some of them into a modern story about programming. But Appropriate Behaviour is not a history book; if anything, it’s a book on social anthropology. The lesson to learn from this post is that it’s not the first anthropological study of programmers; I’d argue that 1971’s The Psychology of Computer Programming is more anthropology than it is psychology. It’s very different from Appropriate Behaviour but they both tread the same ground, analysing the problems faced by a programmer that aren’t directly related to telling a computer what to do.
I imagine the history book would be fun to write, though for the moment I present this, which I hope is also fun to read.
