SJS wrote: > begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:13:37AM -0700: >> On Tue, March 18, 2008 11:09 am, mark wolfe wrote: >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>>> On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 07:07:40PM -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote: >>>>> People seem to be finally shrugging off the Extreme Programming(TM!) as >>>>> unsubstantiated BS. >>>> At my old job there were 2 programmers that went through school together >>>> that always programmed everything together. They were taught pair >>>> programming as The Way to program. >>> Man, one of them will be screwed if the other gets hit by a bus. :) >> Is it just me, or do most of the "new" paradigms seem to enshrine the >> undisciplined, undergraduate, "let's have fun" mentality? > > When you can find a way to get good product out of miserable people, > let me know. (I'll want to shoot you, of course. Purely in self-defense, > you understand, nothing personal.) > > And, from what I've seen, pair-programming can do a LOT to improve the > quality of the resulting code, given a fixed amount of oversight. With > no oversight or quality control, it can devolve into a mess -- but so > would two independent programmers. > >> Acutally documenting a thought process before you start to code isn't >> _that_ bad, is it? > > Indeed it isn't. Having to create a thirty-five-page MSWord document > that uses five custom style sections before you know if something is > going to work in the code, well, that's often worse than nothing at all. > > Making notes, writing stuff down, trying to keep track of the various > alternatives investigated... these are good things, and should be > encouraged. >
Methodologies are good - for focusing attention on [new] ideas or [new] arrangements of ideas - as a platform for teaching concepts and relations of these ideas - for encouraging construction of process and tools to support above - for mnemonic value of buzzwords Methodologies are bad - when seeming to claim magic-potion qualities - by obscuring applicability, limits, alternatives - for ignoring other parts of "the system", and inter-relations - for knee-jerk interpretation of buzzwords I'm sure others can augment/refine this 5-minute list. More important, - Blind (band-wagon) promotion is bad. - Throwing babies out with bathwater is bad. Regards, ..jim (Wisdom is scarce. And shy? Mine seems scarcer each time I look) -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
