🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <64ss5$3F3RB@herold.franken.de>,
Joachim Durchholz <jhd@herold.franken.de> wrote:
>Remember the argument that subroutine calls slow down programs.  
>Subroutines have won because they made programming much easier and faster.

And because they're an elegant concept.  No hacker wants to do the same
thing twice.

>And on the design side, I have seen hours spent on design meetings, put  
>the results into specifications - only to discover two weeks later that  
>the specifications were utter sh*t. Such incidents don't exactly encourage  
>hackers to spend time on design.

I must admit, I see the point here.  I once built an installation script
for work which allowed me to send customers floppies with one line of
instructions.  I wrote up a proposal that we should use it for our
software, and the net result was that someone with about a third (? totally
guessing) of my experience in writing this sort of thing wrote one to
a completely different spec, and it's not nearly as useful to us as the
one I *already had*.

I object strongly to the way this happened.

But don't think I'm against design; I wrote an initial version of my
installer, based on a few simple specs, and then, when I had a pretty
good feel for how it ran, I redesigned it and rewrote.  I'm able to
extend it (if I ever want to) easily, and probably will some day.  All
the hooks are there, so it will (in theory, anyway) be possible for
someone using a newer version to work with installations from the
current version in a general case.  (For instance, it knows about
machine architechtures, even though it only supports one at the
moment.  For a non-binary script, it ran perfectly on a machine of
a different architecture, although I didn't find out until months
later.)

Design good.  Large design team with no clear goal, bad.

-s
-- 
Peter Seebach - seebs@solon.com - Copyright 1996 Peter Seebach.
C/Unix wizard -- C/Unix questions? Send mail for help.  No, really!
FUCK the communications decency act.  Goddamned government.  [literally.]
The *other* C FAQ - http://www.solon.com/~seebs/c/c-iaq.html