I just caught a reference to "extreme programming" in a Wired online article. I was thinking that I first entered this field back in about 1996. Of course, I don't think I had a name for it.
It came about because we (my company) were under a very tight deadline for writing code to demo the first version of IE4.0 (the first really decent browser Microsoft put out). Over the course of five or six weeks we built several whole Web sites that used just about every element of the DOM/Javascript/VBScript/SG. But coding about twenty hours a day we could (and did) get stupidly tired and make obvious mistakes.
So I instituted a program where we did buddy programming. Two people, one monitor and keyboard. One set of eyes to watch and suggest while the other typed. It worked amazingly well.
Now this was panic programming. A hard and fast deadline, young Web coders, lots of Jolt cola. But I thought it was an elegant solution to the immediate problem.
Nobody really seemed to have a problem with it. Perhaps 'cause nobody (except me) had huge egos. And after you had stared at a problem for an hour or two and your neighbor solved it in ten minutes you could really see the value.
Now it's a coding philosophy. And people are writing books about it. I prefer the term "pair programming"--which I just saw for the first time in the Wired article.
Posted by artandscience at July 13, 2004 01:09 PM