On Feb 4, 2008 11:49 AM, William Attwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hey Roberto, it's been awhile. By cross-posting, I'm assuming you mean > posting the same message to more than one user group; am I correct?
Yes. > You came across as attacking me without attacking me. I'll do my best to > re-iterate without defending, as we're all allowed our opinions. No attacking, William. I was disagreeing with an opinion, and even so, my understanding of it. That's very different from attacking you, the person. It's hard to convey tone and emotion in e-mail, particularly when it's a quick reply like for mailing lists. Furthermore, I find it useful to develop a thick skin, particularly for use in mailing lists. Too often I see people in mailing lists who get offended so easily it's almost impossible to have a good discussion with them. > I follow the design out Methodology. I design the data then the > application, not the application then the data. In doing so, I like to > create my ER, UML, and/or ORM diagrams. Not only do these help in a team I might be a bit unorthodox here, as I don't really like to use ER diagrams to design database structures. I use them for visualization, but for design, pencil, paper and vi suffice. I believe C.J. Date has talked in favor of this approach. > > I find that often the "I'm a visual person and need boxes" speech > > means the programmer needs a crutch and can't seem to dig into the > > code without those crutches. Realize that I'm not saying that good > > documentation, including graphs, are bad. > > > That's an odd view. Every developer has developed their own way to take an Why? > idea and turn it into a program. It just so happens that I have to > visualize the application, data, and relationships prior to creating the > program. This is due to the way my memory is hard wired; through images. > I rely heavily on my Visual Memory in everything I do. It seems you've > taken a different, more popular approach to programming that doesn't rely on > Visual Memory. You say it's more popular based on what? In my experience most people that grew up with Visual Studio-type tools seem to fall into the "I'm a visual person" type of box, and that appears to be a much bigger group. You and I just might have different understandings of what "visual" means. I don't use boxes and graphs to "visualize" an application's design in my head, or to design the application, or even its data. As I said before, I find that distracting, slow, and constraining. But YMMV obviously. -Roberto /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
