Software development is not black and white
Whatever other qualities it might have, software development is rarely a land of black and white alternatives. It's a land of enormous variety, populated by people with widely different needs, so it's not surprising that when two people look out over the same part of the landscape, one of them sees beauty and elegance, and the other sees an intellectual desert. XP seems to generate this sort of response, all the way from the name up. After all, why call it "Extreme Programming"? If one more person asks me if XP involves bungee cords or skiing down vertical slopes, my response may cause bodily injury!
I've heard a number of interpretations: One is that the emphasis should actually be on the "programming," because one of the central notions in XP is that the programming activity is primarily responsible for delivering business value. Another is that "extreme" refers to how often a team follows the individual practices. For example, any team can pair programs some of the time, but an XP team pairs programs all of the time.
Kent Beck, the father of Extreme Programming and one of the founders of the Agile Alliance, says that the term was intended to convey the intensity with which programming can be done. "Extreme Programming is an aware and focused activity -- all dials turned to 10 -- attending to everything you need to attend to and wasting no energy on things that don't matter," Beck said. Although Beck says it wasn't his intent, my experience is that one of the strengths of the name is that it provokes an emotional response. Jim Highsmith, creator of the Adaptive Software Development methodology and frequent author and commentator on agile software development, echoed this sentiment in Agile Software Development Ecosystems when he reflected, "I don't think many people would get excited about a book on 'Moderate Programming'. New markets, new technologies, new ideas aren't forged from moderation, but from radically different ideas and the courage to challenge the status quo."
Talkback
I have been programming, on various sized machines, since 1968. The tools have changed a lot in the intervening years, but the goals and techniques of producing economical, cost-effecient code have not. Read "The Mythical Man Month" for a good intro into how to produce good value for your programming dollars. The phrase Extreme Programming is just the latest slang for good techniques. It brings to mind other slang terms, phat being one. However, every generation seems to need to relearn those methods that work well. I also feel that, particularly in applications programming, writing code is just another form of communication with another human. If you are not so good at relating/communicating to other folks, you won't turn out particularly good programs/systems either. This applies especially to those of us who are down in the trenches, earning our bread and butter at some obscure shop and who may not be the genius kid hacker that we hear too much about. I often wonder though, what would we be doing had the computer not been invented?