Return of the Mystery Machine Bus

The sequel to Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus, posted to Google+ on 15 August 2012, two and a half weeks after the original. Like its parent, the only durable public copy was a GitHub gist preserved by an audience member (taylor/3804760); the underlying Google+ post vanished when the platform shut down. The argument extends in three substantial directions: the conservative-vs-liberal divide is reframed as a difference in how programmers regard their code (asset vs. liability); the planning style is recast as a choice between building cities and building military encampments; and the deep technical disagreement is located in action at a distance — the question of whether other people are allowed to reach into your code and change how it behaves.

The first half is reactive — responding to commenters on the original Bus piece, defending the political-axis taxonomy against false-dichotomy objections, and refining the model from "liberal-vs-conservative" toward something closer to "libertarian-vs-conservative". The second half, beginning with "Do You Respect Your Code?", is where the new material lives. The anecdote about Gregor Kiczales presenting AOP at Amazon — "Because sometimes code is Broken, and this gives your users a way to fix it without bothering you" / "But Sir, you are mistaken. Our code is Awesome" — is one of the cleanest worked examples in the corpus of the liberal/conservative divide playing out as a technical disagreement inside an engineering organization.