Is passion antithetical to good programming?

[Trevor Rotzien]

This guys thinks so:
http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2008/03/31/the-case-against-passion/
Thoughts?

Trev

[Stevi Deter]

tl,dr.

Actually, I gave up when he failed to define what he meant by passion up front.

To me, it's just standard rant. Some good points, some BS points, with
a title aimed to get maximum attention.

--Stevi

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[Kelly Leahy]

I didn't read the link, but I would say that passion is necessary, but
not sufficient, and that discipline is also necessary but not
sufficient.

In particular, I think a good software engineer must have the correct
balance of discipline and passion. Without one or the other, they
will either stagnate or will be constantly distracted by the things
they are passionate about. Also, those with lots of passion and not a
lot of discipline tend to be "all over the place" in terms of their
development work - they seem to move from one "shiny thing" to the
next without going back to reflect on what was good or bad about
previous code that they wrote or taking the time to change that code
to be more consistent with what they've learned. They also tend to
experiment way too much in "production" codebases, rather than spiking
out their ideas and letting them "ferment" a bit before putting them
into action in a production codebase and affecting others on their
team.

I've worked with people across the board in both passion and
discipline. In my experience, it sucks to work with those that don't
have one of these two characteristics, or have way too much of a
misbalance between them.

Kelly

[Trevor Rotzien]

Good points. I also think that passion is most beneficial when it's in
the right place. For example, having a passion for the _principles_
over the tools or the language or even a sense of code ownership is
something that can raise the level of excellence of the person, and
hopefully by influence, the team.