begin quoting boblq as of Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 01:06:43AM -0800:
> On Thursday 24 March 2005 12:27 am, Stewart Stremler wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Bullshit.
Right back at you.
> If you don't know what will come you cannot
> forward design. And I assert you don't know
> what will come.
I assert that it often doesn't matter. It's easier to tackle a problem
if you keep an eye out for it than if you let yourself get blindsided.
I personally don't like crisis-mode.
> Mostly the generalizations are powerful, but
> wrong. The next generation is stuck fixing the
> "brilliance" of their forebearers.
There's a difference between thinking ahead and trying to be clever.
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan
Simplicity is thinking ahead. "I will have to maintain this code
someday." Using configuration files is thinking ahead. "The user might
want to change some of these values." Using constants is thinking ahead.
"You never know when the value of PI might change." Separating the UI
from the logic is thinking ahead. "I might want want an X version of
this program."
Not all generalizations are good, I agree. XML appears to be a generalization
for generalization's sake, for example. Many "frameworks" do nothing but
obscure the goal. Too much abstraction is a problem in and of itself,
equal to the problems of no abstractions.
> Duh,
All error-handling is "forward thinking". It's "What if this goes wrong?"
Why is that stupid?
> boblq "not as smart as stewart"
But twice as opinated, and only half the calories!
-Stewart "Different burn-scars than Bob" Stremler
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