Chaos vs. Best Practice: Let Them Eat Cake

Even if you didn't know who _why was a couple weeks ago, most likely you've gathered enough since then to know that he was a very bright and artistic programmer (or a very bright and logical artist?) who inexplicably erased his digital presence.

But enough about _why, as that dead horse has been and is currently being beaten to horse pudding. However, in looking through some of _why's archives (things are rarely truly erased), I found this insightful and interesting blog post.

To sum up, _why feels like so called "best practices" are dead, boring, and stifling. Good, artistic and revolutionary code comes from chaos. Diagrams and TDD are simply scripted banality. I see his point, but I responded to his post thus:

Refusing to be stifled by best practices is one thing, and it’s not a new thing; to touch on the gagging cliches, everyone who’s ever caused a shift in perception or the field of possibilities--Beethoven, Lennon, Newton, DaVinci--questioned the “best practices” of their field in their day. But you mentioned yourself that we can’t possibly understand every avenue, every corner, of the systems we work with. Isn’t that why we have best practices? To invent the wheel without understanding friction coefficients is foolish. Even though you disagree with their choice, maybe your predecessors decided a sleigh made more sense because you didn’t realize that you live in North Dakota.

Chaos is for after-hours. Chaos is a bunch of possibilities and fewer probabilities, with only one or two sure things. Once you’ve polished all that and have one sure thing in your hands, use it at your day job. At that point, it’s a best practice. Best practices have an origin. Chaos has a conclusion; to claim to subscribe to one and reject the other is short-sighted. To accept both as part of the process shows your passion and dedication to your field.

To expand on this response, there are three types of programmers with respect to chaos and best practice:

• Great programmers who can dabble in chaos, confident that a best practice will rise from the ashes of many smart--but failed--attempts. They then share and use these practices. These are the French elite of programmers.


• Decent programmers who dabble in chaos but do not develop best practices. Such dabbling helps them to see the wisdom in best practices and use them wisely to make solid software. These are the French bourgeoisie.


• Programmers who shouldn't be programmers--the peasant farmers.

I appreciate _why's contributions to programming-as-art. And I really believe that he is brilliant enough to develop best practices from chaos. But his advice to abandon best practice for chaos is saying to the rest of us, "Let them eat cake!" I'm sure his elitism is unintentional, and I certainly don't mean to villianize him by any means. But cake is a luxury and an artistic tribute to the beauty of food. Buildings are built by men eating meat and potatoes. Solid, robust and maintainable software is developed by programmers who use best practices.