I had a nice time chatting with Andrew Park of Wired recently about some of the subjects on which I have so frequently opined in this and other venues: simplicity in software, programmer happiness, and the role 37signals has played in promulgating those values in the tech world.

Park cited me as a source in the resulting article; (and graciously made a salutary reference to Lovetastic and my consulting firm.)

It’s an interesting article, and I’m glad to see more journalists paying attention to the fact that Rails and 37signals applications are important as much for having shifted the contemporary discourse about software as they are for the technologies in question themselves. But I think if the article had any weakness, it was that it didn’t very thoroughly discuss something to which it only alluded in its closing sentence: “’I’m not designing software for other people,’ Hansson says. ’I’m designing it for me.’”

Not enough attention has been paid to the growing movement in the software development community that suggests that programmer happiness is the most important factor in making quality software—the argument that code is meant to be read by humans first and computers only secondarily—that in order to write software that addresses real human needs we need to approach the problem of software development from a more human perspective. These “emo programmers” (if I may borrow Kathy Sierra’s coinage, which was originally intended as a joke) recognize that the most costly aspect of software today is the labor involved in making it. Performance is cheap. On the other hand, creating, customizing, and maintaining huge (and hugely complex) bases of inscrutable software code is very expensive.

There is increasing sentiment in the software world that we should be happy to take performance hits if it means the process of software development can me made more sustainable, pleasant, and simple. That’s what Rails does. And in this it embodies a sweeping philosophy about the manner in which software development should proceed, which stands firmly in opposition to the prevailing view in much of the Fortune 500 world.

I’d like to see us take up “emo programming” as a badge of pride to describe this nascent philosophy. Original terms of dismissiveness like “suffragette” and “tory” have subsequently been taken up as banners around which to rally movements, so there is no reason we shouldn’t do the same. Hopefully this article is an early sign that more people are paying attention to this movement and taking it seriously for what it is: an entirely new way of thinking about the how and whys of software development, and about the fundamental relationship between humans and their computers.