[TUHS] Craft vs Research (Re: CMU Mach sources?

[Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>]

On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 21:18:06 -0700 Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> It's not about money.  It's about caring about your craft.  I cared,
> the people I have worked with in industry cared, if they didn't I
> left.
>
> The point I was trying to make was that you can be a student and still
> be a pro.  Or not.  The pros care about their craft.  The Mach people,
> in my you-get-what-you-paid-for opinion, were not pros.  They got a
> lot done in a sloppy way and they left a mess.
>
> I don't know how to say it more clearly, there are plenty examples of
> students that wrote clean code.  Mach was cool, clean code it was not.

I beg to differ with Larry. Research is basically directed
exploration.  You may have a vague idea about what you're
seeking or you may decide to pursue something you stumbled
upon.  But you are mainly hacking a path through the jungle as
it were.  In my view it is much too early to build permanent
roads (i.e.  write "production quality code") during
exploration.  And if you spend time building roads, you are
likely going to slow down or are already stuck and simply
using road building to procrastinate! Craft certainly counts
but it is not all important.

You should just build *what you absolutely need* and do so as
simply as possible and keep moving.  In fact, the more
permanent structures you build, the more afraid you will be to
throw away bad bits and pieces if you have to change
direction!

It doesn't make sense to expect such exploratory code to work
well in production. It is not going to be rock solid, it won't
take care of corner cases, it will have lousy error recovery,
if any, it may not have some necessary features and it may not
scale well.