• From: John Cowan <cowan@m...>
• To: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@g...>
• Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 15:45:36 -0500

Andrew Welch scripsit:

> One approach is: do nothing. Incur that cost if and when it's actually
> needed, don't waste your time/effort/money on it now.

I have never cared for this idea, and indeed there are many obvious
counterexamples.  Tim Bray's stuff on internationalization (back
when it was a new and radical idea) showed that the cost of i18n at
development time is about 10%, whereas after the fact it's about 100%.
This is a specific case of a more general point: it is always simplest
to hard-code all assumptions, but it *will* force redesign further
down the line, and the more assumptions, the more redesign.  Hiding
the assumptions behind an abstract interface doesn't help, for that
interface has hard-wired assumptions too.  And so on.

-- 
John Cowan              http://www.ccil.org/~cowan      cowan@c...
Would your name perchance be surname Puppet, given name Sock?
                --Rick Moen

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: How to be nimble, agile in the face of changing technologies?
    • From: Michael Sokolov <sokolov@i...>
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    • From: Petite Abeille <petite.abeille@g...>
  • RE: How to be nimble, agile in the face of changingtechnologies?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@m...>

• References:
  • How to be nimble, agile in the face of changing technologies?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@m...>
  • Re: How to be nimble, agile in the face of changing technologies?
    • From: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@g...>