Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror fame, recently rebutted my post "Beginners and Hacks", which itself was a reply to his post "C# and the Compilation Tax".

Jeff makes some great points, but at the outset I have to disagree with his statement "The present model of software development is clearly monkeys all the way down. And if you're offended to be lumped in with the infinite monkey brigade, I'd say that's incontestable proof that you're one of us."

No, Jeff, I don't develop via the Infinite Monkeys Model. It disturbs me that any professional in this industry would volunteer for such a pejorative.

While humility is often a good thing, there is a limit. Every developer can't be Linus Torvalds or John Carmack, but every single developer should still have professional self-respect, and a desire to do and be the best that they can.

As for my denial of membership in the worldwide IMB representing "incontestable proof" that I'm among that group, that comment had me reminiscing about a shop I worked in about a decade ago: A new hire had proposed a questionable set of development changes, some of which I was passionately opposed to. He dismissed such disagreement via a hilarious bit of circular reasoning--

a) If you passionately disagree, you are being "defensive"

b) If you're being defensive per the definition given in a), it must be because you are wrong.

It's a simple, comforting way of dismissing opposing perspectives: Everyone who disagrees is just being defensive because they're wrong. It was so remarkable that it has always stuck with me as an example of self-delusional perception.

Jeff goes on to compare his apparent utter dependence on continuous compilation code checking with squiggle-line spell-checking. Even if I were to accept that simile, which I don't at all, let's humor that comparison for a moment.

I've written about the importance of correct spelling before, and have lauded the integration of automatic, continuous spellchecking in Firefox. I'm typing this entry in Microsoft Word, which has helpfully alerted me to several misspellings (mostly the result of typos).

I greatly appreciate these tools, and how they help me with the craft of writing.

Yet I'm not a professional writer. I am, in actuality, a hack and a beginner.

By noting that differentiation, am I then saying that a professional, dedicated-to-the-craft writer would actively abhor such a tool (see the Frank Navasky character from You've Got Mail as just such an anti-technology luddite)?

Of course not, and that is not and has never been the argument I'm making. Those who jump to such a conclusion are just being defensive, and thus, we have learned, must be wrong. No I'm not calling for editing in notepad, or making shoes like we made them 150 years ago.

Instead I'd wager that you'd find the average professional writer, dedicated to the craft of putting words to print, has dramatically less dependency on such accoutrements than "beginners and hacks": They have elevated their creations to the point where something as rudimentary as spelling no longer represents a significant part of their "problem". They compose their creations so carefully that they're less likely to have such errors in the first place: When every line is a conscientious, careful, considered work of art, it's less likely that a typo-detection utility is as important.

For a blowhard blogger like me, vomiting paragraphs of raw thought into an editor, this sort of handholding is much more important, and the use of spell-checking actually speaks directly to my point. Writing is not my craft, and these literary creations aren't craftsmanship. I've even been known to mix up it's and its on occasion, to the delight of my critics.

This brings us to the crux of the whole "debate": It was never about the advanced functionality of tools, or even the use of said features or whether they "annoy" me or not, but instead I'm speaking to a growing trend of laziness and carelessness in coding, where developers emit screens of code (probably gloating about their remarkable LOC achievements), and after spending as much time fixing up the many automatically detected errors they spend weeks trying to diagnose the much more insidious logic, design and usage errors that almost certainly permeate their creation.

If their work is so carelessly authored that they consider continuous automated correctness checks a heavily leaned upon, necessary feature of their environment, then I wouldn't put much stock in the quality otherwise.

That is the problem that I argued against, simply stating that when you feel naked and abandoned without these assistants, finding yourself automatically doing frequent compilations to catch egregious mistakes, then you've probably lost touch of the craft, and one's work isn't getting the loving attention it deserves.