Andy and Joel

I've been catching up on some geek reading lately. You know those books that twinkle at you from the bookshelf, when you know good and well you should read FooBar in Action book or some other varmint-ridden OReilly book, some books entice with their "You don't need to read me, you want to read me" smoky looks. Well, I succumbed recently. I had a trip and decided that instead of taking "normal" reading material, I would take two enticing geek-tomes. My choices? Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld and Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity by Joel Spolsky. While at first glance, it looks like I picked the 2 books with the longest sub-titles, that wasn't the case.

Both books are great reads, but the interesting juxtaposition between them is the cultural whiplash you get if you read them side-by-side. The Mac book is all about figuring out The Coolest Way to Do This Thing That Hasn't Been Done Before, mostly in Motorola 68x assembly language. It's frightening to think that the first Macs (you know, the ones with a graphical user interface) had only 128K of memory! The overriding concern was uncompromising excellence. Joel's book is much more pragmatic. It has lots of good advice for anyone engaged in software development. In fact, lots of the advice that I foist on people in my Clean Up Your Code talk overlaps with some of Joel's advice. In one of the chapters he talks about the battle within Microsoft between the pragmatists and the visionaries.

Which brings up the interesting question: when should you be pragmatic and when should you be visionary? If the Mac guys had been pragmatic, we would have had a slightly sexier Applet ][e, not the Mac. But, being visionary doesn't mean that you win or even survive (see BeOS, Amiga, NextStep, the list goes on and on). That's the razor's edge we talk as technologists -- figuring out when to be pragmatic (and get paid, keep a job, and other mundane concerns) and when to say "What the f%#k -- I designing a dialog box with rounded corners because it's never been done before!". For more information about this dilemma, see Rails, Ruby on.