Wait, Let Me Explain My Theory! What Steve Martin Taught Me About Writing Software
Steve Martin has a great autobiography about his comedy career called “Born Standing Up.” Like many comedians, he’s a smart guy and has great advice about practice and improvement. You can get most of the same thing from this interview, if you take time to read it.
He talks a lot about his early comedy and how it just doesn’t quite work (he’s right, it doesn’t - go back and watch.) He has some really interesting new ideas, but he doesn’t yet understand the important old ideas. He wasn’t good at physical comedy yet, his timing was off, he was clever but not consistent. He knew it wasn’t working and he wanted to say, “but wait, let me explain my theory!”
I’m a software engineer. Is it just me, or are there an awful lot of us whose pet theories don’t quite work, and when we’re called on it we say the same thing?
Until you have the fundamentals right, your new ideas mostly don’t work.