On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 2:26 AM, Tim Daneliuk <tun...@tundraware.com> wrote: > On 11/15/2013 02:19 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> Nobody sets out to*design* a tangled mess. What normally happens is that >> a tangled mess is the result of*lack of design*. > > This has been an interesting thread - to me anyway - but this bit > above caught my eye. People write programs for lots of reasons - > personal, academic, scientific, and commercial - but I actually > don't thing the resultant messes are caused by a "lack of > design" most of the time. In my experience they're caused by only two > things: > > 2) An evolving set of requirements.
This can be an explanation for a lack of design, but it's no less a lack. Sometimes, something just grows organically... from a nucleus of good design, but undesigned growth. Maybe it's time it got redesigned; or maybe redesigning would take too much effort and it's just not worth spending that time on something that's going to be phased out by the next shiny thing in a couple of years anyway. Doesn't change the fact that the current state is not the result of design, but of disorganized feature creep. That's not necessarily a terrible thing, but Steven's point still stands: such lack of design often results in a tangled mess, and a tangled mess can often be blamed on lack of design. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
