In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Alex Martelli) wrote:
> And even if I'm wrong, and a Joe Supercoder I've never met > works best with 3 days a week of solo effort, 3 days of solo coding plus > 2 of strong in-person interaction is NOT the same thing as, say, 3 > _weeks_ of solo coding plus 2 of close in-person presence. It's not hard to imagine somebody locking themselves in a cave, coding like mad for a week, and producing reams of working code. What *is* hard to imagine is that somewhere along the line they didn't get off on some bizarre design tangent and what they produced is reams of code that works, but does the wrong thing, or in the wrong way, or just plain isn't what we needed. I think the real advantage to pair programming is that it gives you lots of small course corrections, before you're emotionally invested in The Wrong Thing. We sit down together, I come up with a brilliant idea, and you shoot it down. We argue about it for a while, and 10 minutes later I (hopefully) see the error of my ways and we set off again in the right direction. Contrast that with me showing up with a week's worth of code and you pointing out a fundamental design flaw I made four and a half days ago. By this point, I've got so much invested in the code, I'm more likely to just dig my heels in. It's just too painful to admit at this point that everything I did last week is garbage. Pair programming is not easy. One of the hard things is to learn to let go. I can't tell you how many times I've been sure I'm right, but decided to let my partner have his way because otherwise we'd make no progress, only to have him volunteer 15 minutes later, "Hmmm, maybe you were right after all". Actually, I can tell you. It's about the same amount of times it's happened in the other direction. Sometimes the best way to win an argument is to take a dive and give the other guy enough rope to hang himself with :-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
