From: entropy@farviolet.com
Date: Wed Apr 07 2004 - 13:50:31 MDT
On Wed, 7 Apr 2004, J. Andrew Rogers wrote:
> > The other issues are that Eliezer doesn't have a lot of time and has
> > relatively little actual coding or architecture experience. You may
> > need to write a million words and throw them away to be a good
> > writer, but you certainly need to write a million lines of code and
> > throw them away to be an excellent programmer.
>
> In general, I think the importance of this is often underestimated. A
> great many things that sound simple in computer science in theory are
> very difficult to implement well in practice on real systems with real
> limits and real asymmetries. Elegant theoretical models often run into
> the barrier of not having a useful elegant implementation in practice
> for anything but toys.
>
> One can easily spend more than a decade steeped in algorithms and code
> and still be discovering new deep patterns in that allow tractable and
> elegant software implementation. And there is little substitute for
> jumping in and getting one's hands dirty.
I'll strongly second this. Formal design methods, patterns, etc. are
no substitute for intuition trained by experience. They are often treated
in CS as the method. Personally I consider them an end result, useful
documentation which may be written down to describe the design you've
implemented to others.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:46 MDT