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:
1) A lack of skill by inexperienced programmers who've been
given more to do than they're yet ready to do and whose
senior colleagues are not mentoring them (or such mentoring
is being rejected because of ego and/or politics).
2) An evolving set of requirements.
#2 is particularly prevalent in commercial environments. Modern
business is forced to respond to changing commercial conditions
in nearly realtime these days. The pace of required innovation is
fast that - all too often - no one actually knows what the "requirements"
are during the design phase. Requirements get *discovered* during the
coding phase. This is not a moral failing or lack of discipline, it's
the simple reality that what you thought you needed to deliver changed
in the intervening 6 months of coding because the business changed.
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