> On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 04:13:51PM +0000, Timm Murray wrote: > > > Arrrgh. This is silly. > > > > > > The cycle is > > > > > > Design > > > Implement > > > Test > > > > > > Rinse and repeat. > > > > No, that's what they teach you in pea-brained CS classes. > > > > Well, I never had a CS class. > > But you tell me how logical it is to say > > "I can't state the hypothesis > until I design and run the experiment"
CS is not a physical science, it is more closely related to mathematics. Typically, mathematics people might be aiming for a certain goal (through a proof), but they may spend pages and pages on dead ends before coming upon the right solution. Then somebody cleans it up and writes a paper containing only the useful parts of all that work. > > Coding is a mechanical process. It *is* the translation of > a design into a specific implementation. > > The only question is at what level the iteration happens, and > whether or not you wish to collaborate with others in the process. > > If you are working by yourself, the iteration can be very fine grained, > with the code being the design documentation, and the design evolving > with every line of code you write. Actually, I don't write code like that, either. Normally, I write out (usually on dead trees) what I want to do, perhaps some notes on the API, and how to fit stuff together. The chicken scratch I scrall in the margins can hardly be considered a specification, but it isn't "desgin evolving with every line of code" either. In fact, the Freenet developers as a whole have long since completed something similar to the above. Between 0.3 and 0.4, there was a big peer review process that went over node announcement and ARKs (others?, and those were well-documented over the mailing list. The specific implementation of those ideas don't have a general spec, they're just a bunch of code sitting in a CVS tree. _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl at freenetproject.org http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devl
