Programming Throwdown, Episode 93, Journey to Programming Mastery.

Take it away, Jason.

I have Andy and Dave, tech enthusiasts here,

to talk about their book, The Pragmatic Programmer. And this is a new edition of a book that's been around for a while, correct? 20 years. This is the 20th anniversary edition. Totally awesome.

So why don't you go into your background and what sort of inspired you to write the original

book and then maybe what inspired you to revisit some of the things you talked about 20 years

ago?

And we only have an hour, right?

Yeah, that's true.

I mean, Dave and I could certainly give the long answer to that question. an hour, right? Yeah, it's true.

I mean, you know, Dave and I could certainly give the long answer to that question,

and we'd be here all day, so we'll try and give the quick version. Because I think a lot of people have heard this by now, too, as we've been talking about,

the new 20th anniversary edition.

But this whole book came out, we really didn't

intend to write a book. It was kind of an accidental book. We really just wanted to write

a white paper for our clients at the time. So Dave and I were out doing consulting and noticing

things people were doing out in the world, out in the workplace, that, wow, that really hurts. That's painful. You know, there's a better way. Have you tried thinking of it this way? Have you tried experimenting with this? Have you tried using this technique? So what is, what does painful mean? Is it painful in the sense that you paint yourself into a corner and now you are really, you have to

rewrite everything? Like, what would pain be when you're doing software development? Well, I think

you have to think back to the 90s. And I know most of your audience probably wasn't born then,

but the feeling in software in the 90s was one of really quiet desperation.

Nothing seemed to be working.

And the quality of software that was being shipped was honestly pretty much abysmal.

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