Joel on davka

[cellio]

A few days ago Joel Splosky posted an article about why (some) software methodologies are bad in which he said that he has trouble explaining a certain concept that comes across more clearly with Hebrew terminology. Being both a technical writer and sufficiently proficient to understand the (simple) terms he was using, I decided to take a crack at it.

His followup, based on a response from an Israeli, was much better than mine (also different in some ways), which is presumably why he chose to publish it. But he complimented mine, which suggests to me that I didn't completely miss the mark.

I wrote (and keep in mind that this is my translation, not necessarily my opinion):

Some people are brilliant in their fields, and it is tempting to try to follow them around and write down everything they do in an attempt to replicate it. But that's not how quality works; part of what a great practitioner does is to make things up as he goes along, informed by his vast experience and knowledge of the world, and you can't distill that down into a recipe or methodology. The master chef is the master chef not because he adds rosemary to the baked haddock but because he understands that this rosemary works with this type of fish with these other ingredients at this temperature. Similarly, you cannot follow a great programmer through code reviews and do what he does without understanding why he structured this code that way and why he used that particular data structure. Not all all software is alike; by trying to follow his methods without being a great programmer yourself, you will end up applying incorrect methods to your own problem.

Methodologies, by their nature, encourage parroting rather than understanding. They're great for McDonalds; they're not so great for the five-star restaurants. So too with programming. The rosh gadol understands; the rosh katan mimics, following a formula. If your task is complicated, a mimic not only fails to help but can actually harm. The last thing you want to do is to encourage people to work that way.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Here are my best guesses for English equivalents to dafka, and neither of them quite cover the ground.

"Contextual" means roughly the same thing, but is somehow too vague and intellectual. It doesn't imply doing a job in a way that actually contributes to the goal.

"Clueful" implies that there's no way of conveying the clue to people who don't have it already.

[cellio]

Dani views the word as meaning both "just because" and "in spite of".

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

How about "stam"? I've taught the word to several otherwise non-Hebrew speaking friends 'cause I use it fairly frequently & can't think of a good English equivalent - "vanilla", "base case", "plain", etc. sometimes work, but they each feel not-quite-right.

[cellio]

I usually use "ordinary". I'm not fluent in Hebrew by a long shot, so I may well be missing subtleties.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

My first non-thinking reaction was "right and wrong", and on looking back at what I wrote I think I see why. "Ordinary" is good for the adjective form but doesn't work so well for the adverb form (which I completely left out of my proposed translations too), as in "doing something stam", i.e. not for a specific/special purpose. I suppose there it could be translated as "just doing something".

[cellio]

Good point. How about "routine[ly]"?

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

To me "routine[ly]" means something different: something that has been done before on a regular basis or as a standard response, whereas "stam" has an implication of lack of special/specific thought.