begin quoting Stewart Stremler as of Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 12:27:57AM -0800: > begin quoting boblq as of Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 12:06:14AM -0800: > > On Thursday 24 March 2005 12:01 am, Stewart Stremler wrote: > > > Shims, or thinking ahead in the design? > > > > Surely you joke. Or are you omniscent? > > Not at all. Omniscence isn't required.
Let me emphasize something that I didn't hit very hard here -- I don't think that _everything_ can be foreseen. Nor do I think that trying to determine _all_ the problems ahead of time is a good idea. Like most things, the extremes aren't the best solution. Pure reaction leads to unstable APIs, fragile code, needlessly complex systems, and a lot of wasted effort. Pure planning leads to inflexible APIs, unhandled cases, needlessly complex systems, and a lot of wasted effort. Every so often I've gotten it right. More often I've been sucked into the implement-it-now-think-about-it-later morass, or grown bored in the let's-think-of-every-possible-case-without-seeing-what-really-happens meetings. There's a happy ground in there somewhere. Or so I believe. A little thought, a little testing, a little development... all things in balance. -Stewart "Top-down problem decomposition/bottom-up tool implementation" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
