Fog Creek Software
Discussion Board

Dilbert does Extreme Programming

Does this mean that XP is now officially a buzzword?

Ged Byrne
Thursday, January 9, 2003

no, it's a buzzword for a long time now

Thursday, January 9, 2003

Yeah, it's a buzzword, and a really annoying one.  For years, I've been using the letters "XP" to mean "cross-platform".  Now the term is way too ambiguous because it might also mean "Extreme Programming" or "the latest version of Windows".

If only we had a tool that would enforce consistent namespace usage in real life just like compilers do for code...

Eric W. Sink
Thursday, January 9, 2003

You know, I actually use namespaces in conversation, or at least in IM.  I have a coworker Work::Jay, an old friend from high school Past::Jay, and a friend now Present::Jay (who lives with one of my non-Jay coworkers, thus causing the original confusions, where Mark would say "Jay's leaving for vacation on Thursday," and I would respond "But he can't be, he's already said he's coming the the dev meeting Friday morning!"  And then hit myself on the head.)

Thursday, January 9, 2003


You don't like the term XP because you were... using it first?  :)  And I agree - it's a dumb term.  I prefer 'pair programming'.

Thursday, January 9, 2003

IIRC, "pair programming" is only a subset of XP. Doesn't really work as a synonym.

But then I don't know that much about XP...

Thursday, January 9, 2003

Yes, the same way that all the other Agile methodologies are buzzwords.  Extreme programming (XP) just happens to be the one that happens to have the most hype associated with it.

Kent Beck chose to call his methodology "Extreme Programming" hoping that this name would get it some attention. After all, there are thousands of development methodologies out there and hundreds that are specific to the OO software development paradigm.

One Programmer's Opinion
Thursday, January 9, 2003

On misusing the word Extreme Programming:

I worked for a while at a customer site and one day the customer project manager (yes, we had customer project manager and "contractor" project manager) came to our office (big office, 8 to 12 developers; very loud). That was one day before going online (we were hopelessly trying to fix the biggest bugs under pressure) and after a few weeks of "death march" programming (long hours until 2 AM, afterwards McDonalds, no land in sight etc.) behind us. And then he said: Now we are doing extreme programming!

The same guy picked up the word "facade" at some conference and promptly his powerpoints were full of facades: He renamed the layer we called "Business Logic" as facade for the database!

I left the project.

Pointy Haired Boss
Thursday, January 9, 2003

Sink: oh my gosh namespaces for use in everyday life? =)

Friday, January 10, 2003

I am curious as to how he pronounces the :: in casual conversation.

Just me (Sir to you)
Friday, January 10, 2003

No need to pronounce it - it represents a space!

Mathematical Dunce
Friday, January 10, 2003

I think it should be done like Victor Borge's Phonetic Punctuation, where you use a different little sound to represent different punctuation marks. So it would be something like ' home ffsshhh Jay' and 'work ffsshhh Jay'.

(For those of you too young to remember this, try )

David Clayworth
Friday, January 10, 2003

A former boss of mine said that Object-Oriented technology is out of date, that it's been overtaken by other things. Funny how people writing in IEEE software and CACM seem to think that it's now the dominant paradigm in software development.

Having said that though, this is the same former boss that explained to me that he didn't have any formal qualifications in computing, but that if you spend enough time around software you find out that there's only a limited set of things they can do. - (Wow, yes I thought. Now I'm going to hear how this manager has independently reinvented computability theory. Soon he's going to discover that there are multiple ways of representing what computers can do and then he's going to postulate that they're equivalent - "the Pointy-Hair-Turing thesis".) I could have said something, but even if I had felt brave enough, I don't have words to adequately express the depth of my contempt.

Some people just don't know what they are talking about. Sadly, some of them get into positions of power.

Dafydd Rees
Thursday, January 30, 2003

*  Recent Topics

*  Fog Creek Home