On 11/1/06, Cor Nouws <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Michael Meeks wrote:
> But we didn't write down a spec. We conceived of the idea, then
> implemented it, now we have it. The original conception of course was
> prolly inaccurate, no-one gets things right 1st time, we most likely
> have a solution that is now far better than that, similarly we are now
> probably aware of the various limitations of the current approach, and
> various next steps / future development to do.
> The problem is that there is a very large difference between conceiving
> an idea and writing it down as prose (with pictures); you can conceive
> of things almost instantly, writing a general document for an uncertain
> audience is very time consuming.
Conceiving an idea can be very easy. But too often - and I don't have
any particular event nor person in mind, seriously - an easy idea turns
out to be less consistent, less good, once the idea-owners is forced to
write it down, to make it clear...
While I agree with the gist of your statement, I must say this is not
universally applicable to all forms of creative activities, of which
coding is one.
Often a conceived idea of a certain code design can be easily
formulated in terms of programming code, but the same idea may not be
easily expressed in words. Even if an attempt is made to express it
in words, it just incurs a great deal of pain, and more often than
not, it ends up not accurately depicting the original idea, or ends up
with lengthy piece of sentences and paragraphs that accurately depicts
the idea, but becomes far larger in size than the original piece of
code it tries to depict. In the latter case, it is much easier to
test the idea with code rather than with words.
Moreover, as a programmer gains more experience thinking and writing
code, the tendency to conceive of ideas instantly without the help of
words becomes stronger. So, to a seasoned programmer, dumping an idea
in terms of code is equivalent of non-programmer dumping an idea in
words, not to mention doing so is much more pleasant and fun activity
than trying to describe an algorithm or code design in words alone...
Just for what it's worth...
Kohei
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