🚀 go-pugleaf

Joachim Durchholz (jhd@herold.franken.de) wrote:
: I haven't said a word of design phase vs. programming phase. And my  
: impression is indeed that a hacker doesn't want to waste time on design  
: when he could use to build working programs. But that is more a question  
: of the point of view; the hackers that build large systems do design in an  
: informal way, and they usually don't document it. Nevertheless all larger  
: programs done by hackers have a design.

I don't think it's a point of view, the evidence is usually in the code
itself.  Even without a formal design specification beforehand, the quality
of output seperates the truely dangerous code-first mentality from the ones
who had a clear understanding of the problem before they ever fired up the
editor.

: 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.

That's short-sighted at best, a thoughtful person can seperate the process of
design from the poor leadership that resulted in a useless specification.

-jack-