It’s Friday afternoon and I’m in a contemplative mood. For some reason, I’ve been thinking about my first manager, who I wasn’t very fond of at the time. I’m sure I was a real pain in his backside as well, being a fresh-out-of-college know-it-all.
One of the things that drove me nuts about him was the way he mangled metaphors and sayings. He liked to tell me “never put the horse before the cart” and stuff like that. But one saying he used will always stick with me. He’d say:
Patrick, software is like a bowl full of jello. And our job is to get our arms around that bowl!
I remember thinking that I’d rather not get my arms around a bowl full of jello. What good would that do? It would still be a bowl full of jello, and I’ve never liked jello anyway. But what also struck me at the time was that this really is what software is like to people who don’t leverage information hiding. Spaghetti is almost too clean a metaphor (at least you can pull out some noodles if you want). Jello really captures the nasty, sticky grossness of badly encapsulated software.
Even though I didn’t like this manager at the time, he did inadvertently start me down the path to software modularity. Hopefully by focusing on modularity, we can stop dealing with bowls of jello and at least work with jello shots 🙂
