[racket] OFFTOPIC - Quote on Programming

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:16:55PM -0400, Ray Racine wrote:
> Ancillary story.
> 
> On one occasion I did do a detailed business rule design to the extant of
> constructing a full on Zed document.  In this case there were 10-15K lines
> of completely opaque RPG code dealing with pricing.  Not a living soul on
> this planet understood how pails, buckets, gobs, and dump trucks full
> shadowy data (most of which at the end of the day, didn't influence a damn
> thing) were poured into said system and then machinations resulting in
> spitting out a price from the other end.  Think your digestive track here
> and you're pretty close.
> 
> It took weeks to put the document together.  But ... when we went to code,
> it was the smoothest flowing constant stream effort to completion of any
> software project I've experienced.  After code completion we found far more
> bugs in the spec than we did in the code.

Exactly.  You didn't just hand off the spec to a bunch of coders and get 
a perferct system from them.  You changed the spec as a result of coding 
experience.

>  Most of the issues were failures
> to uncover subtle corner cases (most of which were themselves bugs, legacy
> deprecated rules etc) in the RPG code.

And the RPG code was itself an initiall spec, however imcomprehensible 
and incomplete it was.
> 
> Summary.
> Overall far less bugs.
> Lesser proportion of bugs were from variance between spec and code.
> Most bugs were in variance between spec and reality (actual business rules).
> Overall, I liked it the approach to the point where I would apply it again.
> Interestingly, I never have, though there have been a few situations where
> it would have been applicable.
> 
> These days, I'd throw someone out the window who wanted to start coding
> from the get go with the idea we'll sort of Agile random walk the code and
> logic to the desired end state, as I will someone who advocating full on
> upfront MBase.

I'm not advocating coding without a spec, either.  You need both.  And 
you need both to evolve as you gain further understanding of the real 
problems.

> 
> 
> On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 11:36 AM, Richard Cleis <rcleis at me.com> wrote:
> 
> > My experience is the same. But try to explain to a program or project
> > manager that at least four things gradually change to complete a project:
> > design, code, tests, and docs. I am no longer expecting to ever work on a
> > project where the leaders do not insist each of those is a milestone
> > completed in some exact order that was preconceived by someone who never
> > finished a good project.
> >
> > rac
> >
> > On Mar 19, 2013, at 2:29 PM, Patrick Li wrote:
> >
> > > My personal experience is that a good and detailed design is hard to
> > > get to *without* doing the coding.
> > >  -Patrick
> > >
> > > On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Jos Koot <jos.koot at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> One remark down intermixed in your email.
> > >> Jos
> > >>
> > >>> -----Original Message-----
> > >>> From: users-bounces at racket-lang.org
> > >>> [mailto:users-bounces at racket-lang.org] On Behalf Of Hendrik Boom
> > >>> Sent: martes, 19 de marzo de 2013 15:15
> > >>> To: users at racket-lang.org
> > >>> Subject: Re: [racket] OFFTOPIC - Quote on Programming
> > >>>
> > >>> I forget where that quotation came from originally, but it
> > >>> antedated the
> > >>> days where internal documentation was the norm.
> > >>>
> > >>> On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 06:20:57AM +0100, Jos Koot wrote:
> > >>>> Well, that may depend on how you define "clever code".
> > >>> Surely it is clever
> > >>>> to write well documented code that can easily be
> > >>> understood, debugged,
> > >>>> maintained and reused by yourself and by others.
> > >>>
> > >>> The "clever" refers to cleverness merely in producing a
> > >>> foemalism that
> > >>> appears to work.
> > >>>
> > >>>> Understanding may require
> > >>>> knowledge of the discipline the code is written for, of
> > >>> course. In my
> > >>>> opinion it helps a lot first finishing the documentation
> > >>> and the design
> > >>>> (both user and 'inside' docs) before starting coding.
> > >>>
> > >>> You're talking about metacleverness -- the know-yourself kind of
> > >>> cleverness that acknowledges your own limitations and take them into
> > >>> account.
> > >>>
> > >>>> With good and well
> > >>>> described design it is even possible to leave the coding to
> > >>> another person,
> > >>>> just like an architect designs a building and constructors build it.
> > >>>> My 2c, Jos
> > >>>
> > >>> I've never found it to be feasible to leave the coding to another
> > >>> person, except in cases where the remaining coding is so
> > >>> trivial that a
> > >>> machine could do it.
> > >>
> > >> I have experienced some good things leaving the coding to others. I
> > think
> > >> that in some cases a good and detailed design makes coding almost
> > trivial.
> > >>
> > >>>
> > >>> [ In which case it makes sense to use a compiler.  :-) ]
> > >>>
> > >>> -- hendrik
> > >>>>
> > >>>> From: users-bounces at racket-lang.org
> > >>> [mailto:users-bounces at racket-lang.org]
> > >>>> On Behalf Of Harry Spier
> > >>>> Sent: martes, 19 de marzo de 2013 2:56
> > >>>> To: users
> > >>>> Subject: [racket] OFFTOPIC - Quote on Programming
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>> I found this quote on a blog and couldn't help sharing it :-)
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>> "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 Kernigan
> > >>>>
> > >>>
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