The Best Software Writing I

What Hacker News says

1. legakyaOct 2016
   I have a different choice -- I really liked Joel's Best Software Writing I.

   Maybe that's just me... but that collection opened my eyes to the "bigger picture" and inspired me to think of my programming as an art/craft.

   thread
2. iendsJan 2014
   I just finished reading the Pragmatic Programmer for the first time and felt that it was pretty much a letdown. For one, it makes a huge number of claims but does not back up these claims by any empirical evidence (even though I think it's mostly right, and that empirical evidence for some of their claims exists). Two, I feel like an undergraduate software course covers 75% of the material in the book (at least mine did). Maybe people have learned since it was first published, or maybe I've just worked on pretty good teams that practiced the stuff, but nothing in there was ground breaking or made me a better developer. Three, there was a lot of filler in the book, summaries, talking about future, and past chapters, etc that added no value except to inflate the page count.

   I feel like Pragmatic Programmer would be a good book to read before starting your first job, or maybe your undergraduate year of college.

   I was going to start Code Complete next, but Pragmatic Programmer was so disappointing I decided to read fiction for the next few weeks instead.

   So to answer your question, the best language agnostic development books I've read are:

   1. 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

   2. The Best Software Writing I

   3. Hackers and Painters

   I always wish Joel would come out with a second volume of #2, or to start his blog up again. I've yet to find something that equals his quality since he stopped writing.

   Show morethread
3. pookMar 2010
   If you haven't read Clay Shirky's essays on the difficulty of maintaining an online community, do it now ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html and http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_user.html ). Actually, read all the source articles in Spolsky's Best Software Writing I ( http://brevity.org/misc/bestswi.html )

   Every online community, from the very beginning, has faced its own crisis of identity as it scales. Perpetual September is as inevitable as the second law of thermodynamics.

   I long considered HN to be a counterexample precisely because the group is not only self-selecting, but constitutionally disinclined to enjoy shallowness. A group of true geeks and entrepreneurs does not have to be coerced into expressing a love of Erlang internals and a hatred of celebrity gossip.

   But, inevitably, any given community will attract people with different interests. A war of sorts inevitably occurs as both subcultures clash and try to gain power. The result is one we've seen in every single online community that has ever been created.

   imho, the culture of HN is smart enough to either find a solution or at least a way to delay this process. There's a reason PG tells us not to complain about "redditization": such complaints are the very thing that dissolves a sense of community and shared values.

   Show morethread
4. tonystubblebineJun 2008
   Awhile back Joel Spolsky compiled Best Software Writing I, a collection of online tech writings from other people. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BestSoftwareWriting.h...

   It seems similar to the format you're imagining and was definitely successful from a quality standpoint. The people who read it, enjoyed reading it.

   That's different than saying it was a huge commercial success or that there's so much good writing that you could fill a themed magazine each month.

   Show morethread
5. efarrerJul 2023
   Hi I'm the author of the blog post and the paper. In the paper I provide a reference to such a claim by proponents of dynamic typing. From my paper: "Because some error detection can be done by both unit testing and static type checking, some proponents of dynamic type checking claim that static type checking is not needed [3]."

   and the reference:

   [3] J. Spolsky and B. Eckel, “Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing,” in The Best Software Writing I. Apress, pp. 67–77, 2005.

   I do agree that development time is an important factor and one that I didn't address simply because that would require a different type experiment. I hope that researchers look into that. I do also think that in addition to development time that overall maintenance time is considered. For example its plausible that dynamic languages are faster to develop, but take longer to make changes due to it being harder to understand, and changes aren't guided by the type system. It is also possible that dynamic languages are both faster and have lower TCO. To be clear I have no idea which is faster, and which has a lower TCO. I'd love to see some scientific evidence on development time and TCO.

   Show morethread
6. FelipeCortezNov 2020
   I've been reading "The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky", which contains some pretty interesting, well-written essays from the early 2000s. What are your recommendations of modern, 2010~2020 era software/tech essays?
   thread