Paul wrote: >Wow. I've been out of school *way* too long. I'm used to projects where >there's no written record of any sort. To have large chunks of the design >fleshed out even *once* in writing is, in my experience, a rare and >precious >thing. I've actually learned this from my various jobs, not school ;-) I've learned (the hard way) that Spec/Doc is absolutely essential to a project. No way around it. > >All we have now is > >basically Jeff going "well, I'm going to write 6 pages of fluffy >quasi-spec > >on a 30,000 LOC implementation of a piecetable." > >Jeff was kind. He's good enough to have written a *damn* impressive 30,000 >LOC without telling you anything about it it all. The spec corresponded >with the first few days of thought on the subject. Then he implemented the >rest and refined it until it did everything it does now. It is impressive. But from a maintainance viewpoint? Absolutely horrible. Considering that I want to rewrite a new backend, knowing some of his throughts/assumptions in english (not C++) would be extremely helpful. >Considering the extreme rarity of true bugs in the code he wrote, I have >zero problem with that. I'd certainly rather have all the code and half >the >docs than the other way around. I'd rather have both. And half is being generous. >We wanted to prove it could be done, and we did a damn good job at it. Hell yeah! >Oh, it certainly makes life easier -- if the docs are maintained >scrupulously, that is. Bad docs are worse than no docs, until you realize >they're wrong, at which point they become useful again. Painful agreement here. >There's no way around it ... it's work to have to drop into a codebase of >between 100K and 1M LOC and find your way around. It's a skill anyone in >the business learns, though. True. The learning curve drops though, provided with the proper tools. That's all I'm saying. >Paul >motto -- an implementation is worth 1000 words Dom motto -- most times, 1000 description do more to help understanding than 30000 lines of implementation - and faster, to boot _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
