Everyone Should Bea Robot

It's really quite simple. If you think everybody should be an individual and do things they think are right giving them the chance to "learn by doing" and to excel at their job, etc., etc. Then simply quit complaining about the mail delivery person, how the cable guy took hours to connect your service, how the teller doesn't understand you just want to check your bank balance. Hey I'm only a week late paying your bill, I've been sick, I just started this job, I'm learning as I go... sure you've got things to do but you have to realize I'm an individual, I'm doing things my way, I'm innovative. It's only an election, hey it isn't easy being a cop, a janitor, a schoolteacher, a fireman, an unemployed actor, an unmarried mother with three children. That manager is a bozo, do you believe she gets paid $2 million a movie, that guy thinks he is so smart.

Let me guess... YOU are an individual... YOU want you and your friends to be recognized for their talents and YOU want all the other people to just get on with servicing your needs (as software developers) because they just serve coffee, they sell life insurance or they play the piano in a supper club and YOU are busy doing important things.

Oh... "XP solves all of this" (duh) -- tl

Eh? I don't see anything on EveryoneShouldBeaToolmaker (which is the only place that links to here) to justify this outburst. It might make sense if someone had been advocating both giving developers a lot of freedom and requiring other people to "just get on with servicing [their] needs", but I don't see any of that. What happened to upset you so much? (And what's it got to do with XP other than that you don't like XP?)

You guessed wrong, Tom. Perhaps you were thinking of someone else.

Sorry about that. I use the word "you" in the generic sense, i.e. "some unamed person." It didn't mean the person who started EveryoneShouldBeaToolmaker and if you trace backwards you find that that page was "inspired" by EveryoneShouldBeaMethodologist. These pages don't exist in isolation but I plainly attached to the wrong message (I just wanted to use the title.)

I'm not explaining it well but let me end by saying I don't dislike XP. Nobody who has written that XP isn't the panacea some would claim it is dislikes XP. They are (I believe) only looking for reason and reason seems out of the question. All religions fall into this trap. You will eventually see (if it isn't happening already) that XP will divide up into factions of "true XP" and "liberal XP." Others are simply heathens. -- tl

I don't see any indication that XP is much like a religion, or that its practitioners are impervious to reason when talking about XP. (Nor, if it comes to that, that all religious people are impervious to reason when talking about their religions.)

Well of course not Zealots don't see zealotry in their own actions. Seriously, I am not calling you a zealot. I am asking you to consider that nobody who is a Democrat sees Gore as a boob and nobody who is a Republican sees Bush as a boob. The other person is always the boob. The other person is always "not thinking reasonably." Only minutes ago I got off the phone with a Verizon "clerk" who explained "what you don't understand is..." followed by a clerk's vision of what I don't understand.

What is curious is I see examples of XP as religion all over the place and if you want to start a page about it I can almost guarantee that many others will express similar feelings.

Finally of course they are not "impervious to reason" reason is simply redefined to be what they believe and unreasonable is... uhhh, your position. XP-types generally do the equivalent of what that clerk did (and they are no different than Java, OS2-Warp, WordPerfect, OOPS, et.al. people, in this regard) they begin with "what you don't understand" when the truth is that they don't understand. That bug in Windows proves it sucks... that bug in Linux is an easily explainable oversight... we just don't understand. -- tl

XP is a religion, except that its leaders repeatedly say that it's not the only way that works. XP is a religion, except that it fails to tell anyone not doing XP that they're wrong (instead saying "you're not doing XP"). XP is a religion, except that you don't have to be doing XP to succeed. XP is a religion, except that there are projects that its leaders say wouldn't be good matches for XP. Other than those things, I agree: XP is clearly a religion. -- WayneConrad

What are those kind of projects that wouldn't be a good match for XP? Could you put them in WhenIsXpNotAppropriate?

I don't know if XP is a religion or not, or if that's "decidable", but I think I've observed some dogmatic following. By that I mean a loyalty bereft of any critical thought process. Thing is, though, you can't blame XP for that. It just happens. In defense of XP, it is not its followers and deserves to be evaluated, situationally, on its own merits. And that applies to Christianity ... (oops, sorry). -- WaldenMathews

Perhaps XP is a RunawayReligion.

That's what happens when a field is short on empirical science, and makes the Ancient Greek Error. -t