January 2018

This entry is part [part not set] of 2 in the series The Thinking Knee

We talked at great length about how agile coding practice can be seen as combining several attempts at attacking the thinking knee, but what about agile non-coding practices. As I push towards the topic, which is it what got me started on this set of muses, I want to offer a bit of caution before we start. I’ve used the thinking-knee idea to elucidate a bunch of seemingly unconnected corners of the practice. It might seem I believe that’s all […]

This entry is part [part not set] of 2 in the series The Thinking Knee

We’ve spent some time on the thinking-knee, but i’m not quite done with it yet. Let’s narrow our focus for a minute, to matters strictly around code & coding. Programmers have been thinking directly & indirectly about ways to evade or at least mitigate the effect of the non-linear thinking knee more or less forever. Dijkstra’s famout short paper, "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", from ’68, is an early example. He doesn’t invoke the knee explicitly, but the harm he’s