Though the title "the duct tape programmers" may be a bit misleading but I think the essence and emphasis was on "Shipping is feature" and over engineering is not.
I don't think Joel meant to say that accumulating technical debt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt) is the way to go, rather he suggested/re-iterated Donald Knuth's statement on optimization: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." in his very own way.
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Though the title "the duct tape programmers" may be a bit misleading but I think the essence and emphasis was on "Shipping is feature" and over engineering is not.
I don't think Joel meant to say that accumulating technical debt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt) is the way to go, rather he suggested/re-iterated Donald Knuth's statement on optimization: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." in his very own way.