Not Your Garden Variety of Software

Programming is Gardening, not Engineering A Conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, is an interview with the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer books in which they describe the Software as Garden metaphor.

Andy Hunt: There is a persistent notion in a lot of literature that software development should be like engineering. First, an architect draws up some great plans. Then you get a flood of warm bodies to come in and fill the chairs, bang out all the code, and you're done. A lot of people still feel that way. ... We paint a different picture. Instead of that very neat and orderly procession, which doesn't happen even in the real world with buildings, software is much more like gardening. You do plan. You plan you're going to make a plot this big. You're going to prepare the soil. You bring in a landscape person who says to put the big plants in the back and short ones in the front. You've got a great plan, a whole design.

Dave Thomas: Also with a garden, there's a constant assumption of maintenance. Everybody says, I want a low maintenance garden, but the reality is a garden is something that you're always interacting with to improve or even just keep the same. ... We want people to view software as being far more organic, far more malleable, and something that you have to be prepared to interact with to improve all the time.

Somehow I'm not totally comfortable with the garden metaphor, but like most metaphors it works as long as you don't look at it too hard. Software development isn't really a garden, but then again, to most people, programs aren't really poems.