Monday, August 27, 2007

Holding a Program in One's Head

Another good essay by Paul Graham:

Holding a Program in One's Head

I'm not sure I totally agree with this part:
Don't have multiple people editing the same piece of code. You never understand other people's code as well as your own. No matter how thoroughly you've read it, you've only read it, not written it. So if a piece of code is written by multiple authors, none of them understand it as well as a single author would.
...
If you want to put several people to work on a project, divide it into components and give each to one person.
I agree you can never understand someone else's code as well as your own. Initially, this is probably good advice, although, even initially, pair programming can be worthwhile. But in the long run, multiple people are going to need to work on the same code. Of course, by this stage it's not in anyone's head anymore anyway.

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