Nikhilesh Rao

Here is why I like duct tape programmers. Sometimes, you’re on ateam, and you’re busy banging out the code, and somebody comes up toyour desk, coffee mug in hand, and starts rattling on about how if youuse multi-threaded COM apartments, your app will be 34% sparklier, andit’s not even that hard, because he’s written a bunch of templates, andall you have to do is multiply-inherit from 17 of his templates, eachtaking an average of 4 arguments, and you barely even have to write thebody of the function. It’s just a gigantic list of multiple-inheritancefrom different classes and hey, presto, multi-apartment threaded COM.And your eyes are swimming, and you have no friggin’ idea what thisfrigtard is talking about, but he just won’t go away, and even if he doesgo away, he’s just going to back into his office and write more of hisclever classes constructed entirely from multiple inheritance fromtemplates, without a single implementation body at all, and it’s goingto crash like crazy and you’re going to get paged at night to come in and try to figure it out because he’ll be at some goddamn “Design Patterns” meetup.

And the duct-tape programmer is not afraid to say, “multiple inheritance sucks. Stop it. Just stop.”

You see, everybody else is too afraid of looking stupid because theyjust can’t keep enough facts in their head at once to make multipleinheritance, or templates, or COM, or multithreading, or any of thatstuff work. So they sheepishly go along with whatever faddishprogramming craziness has come down from the architecture astronautswho speak at conferences and write books and articles and are so muchsmarter than us that they don’t realize that the stuff that they’repromoting is too hard for us.

Here’s what Zawinski says about Netscape: “It was decisions like notusing C++ and not using threads that made us ship the product on time.”

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