Programming philosophies

In the course of my development career, if there’s any one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there are a lot of ways to skin a cat, to borrow a phrase. For any non-trivial task, there are a variety of approaches to developing a system that will perform that task. Often, the approach that a programmer will take is informed by her personal philosophy on programming: should code be elegant or easy to read or as fast as possible, etc.? There is generally a sub-goal of meeting one of these ideals along with the top-level goal of building a functional system.

Jonathan Rentzsch posted an interesting commentary on his philosophy a few months back that I’m just getting to now, where he contends that programmers are not in fact lazy, but actually renaissance men of learning(!). Obviously, some people disagree.