Re: "It works well enough" (was Re: $640.00 to fill the tanks...)

Jose wrote:
Oh, so you are one who blames poor workmanship on the tools.


I'm not talking about workmanship at all. I'm talking about systemic results. Imagine spending $300,000 to redo a house. Chances are pretty good you'd gut it and start over and get exactly what you want. But if you had to live in the house at the same time, and didn't know how much you had to spend, chances are you'd do it piecemeal, and each piece would have to fit the existing work. This limits your choices at each step of the way (you can't get this refrigerator because it won't fit between the two counters, and now you get the counter that works with the refrigerator you settled on... Now, if you have a choice, and the pain of living in the house is not too great, and the compromises you have to live with aren't too big, you might just do it piecemeal anyway, rather than move out for eight months. You'd get a result that's not as good, but it's "good enough". And often, that's good enough.

Incrementally building a system isn't the same as spaghetti code which is what you were railing against and blaming on a language. The language didn't create the spaghetti code, the programmer did. Very clear code can be written in assembly language and very convoluted code can be written in Pascal, Ada or Cobol. It isn't a language issue, it is a programmer issue.

Matt
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