Re: Designing vs. Implementing, Was: Why context-free?

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?J=FCrgen_Kahrs?= <Juergen.Kahrs@vr-web.de>
4 Nov 2005 14:05:52 -0500

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From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?J=FCrgen_Kahrs?= <Juergen.Kahrs@vr-web.de>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 4 Nov 2005 14:05:52 -0500
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 05-10-053 05-10-061 05-10-062 05-10-200 05-11-002 05-11-018 05-11-023
Keywords: design, comment
Posted-Date: 04 Nov 2005 14:05:52 EST

Nick Maclaren wrote:


> I don't know. What I do know is that X amount of effort spent in
> designing for implementation cleanliness, failure handling, error
> detection and diagnosis saves 3-10 X effort in debugging and
> support, and often speeds up the time to the first genuinely working
> product. But it slows down the time to demonstration considerably,
> which is bad for researchers who have no interest in anything beyond
> that and developers controlled by "all that matters is time to
> market" salesdroids.


Yes, that's the way it is. Reminds me of some really bad software I
have seen. I would get into legal trouble if I gave examples. So, I
find that there is no way out of this.


> The difference in providing facilities for end users and for
> third-party developers is similar, but is a lot more subtle. I do
> know that one of the major reasons that it is so hard to get the
> messages across is that few people nowadays have any real
> familiarity with all aspects of developing, supporting and using
> products. That never was common, but is as rare as hen's teeth in
> people under 50.


A way out of this may be to educate these people differently. If
there is one principal designer (the Software Architect) who writes
the software interfaces (.h files or .ads in ADA), while someone else
writes the implementations. Is this likely to happen ? No, "we cant
afford to pay two when one will do".
[Thus endeth the thread. Thanks to all, it was certainly interesting. -John]


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