About the NOOB definition– Part 2: Globalization.

Prior the Internet days (some people talk about prior television), we had different villages, local ones, with no communication. Now, we live in a global village. We need to communicate and share knowledge, even in different languages and cultures. Furthermore, we learned it is not just us and the "my limited world", but any thing we do affects the globality.

Now, when working on a real world problem, working to find a solution of course, we need to communicate and all or our work is to complement the one from others. There is no one single person that fights all the villains and the rest of the team observes and cheers.

Solving a problem with a software intensive system, involves working with all parts of the system: Hardware, Software, people and processes. No one lives alone with its computer, everybody interacts with all the other components of the system, and the developers are part of that system too!.

Making sense of that, the strategy of working only in my local line forgetting there is something beyond that, goes back to the local world and denies globality. Does it mean you need to work all at the same time? No. It means you work in your local line knowing there is something bigger of which that line is an important part.
What does this matter in Steve Yegge’s post about NOOBs? Well, going extreme, the post indicates there is much waste, fat we need to remove to be healthy. The comments, even the modeling and describing language structures are needless for the seasoned, non-noob programmer. I agree, as long as the programmer is working in a system that has only two components: the programmer and his lines of code.

Unfortunately, that is not the reality. A system not only requires the work of many other components, some non-software and some non-programmers, but also requires all those components to communicate at design and execution time. Robert Martin once said that one of the software functions is actually communicate with people, readers that may have not participated in the development. Does that mean the comments should stay? Not exactly, but that the code itself should be readable, understandable.

One way of doing that, for the development group, is using sentences that make sense and do the function (you can scramble the sentences and do the same thing but being not readable).

Globalization in the System means all components will need to communicate and work with other components. Creating the product with those characteristics, because they are needed, is not being NOOB, but being aware of the fact the software is not an island.

William Martinez.