Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> This sounds like a typical conflict beween "top down" and "bottom up"
> approaches to writing software. Do you spend weeks in theoretical
> discussion and design documents, then code at the very end? Or do you
> hit the ground coding, dissect the results, code again, dissect, etc.
> until you arrive at a design?
>
> While you're certainly welcome to start coding mockups of merge or
> history-tracking behaviors, I think what Branko's trying to say is
> that historically, this project has always been dominated more by the
> "top down" sorts of people. We much prefer to spend two months
> discussing theoretical frameworks before we write any code at all. I
> think you're likely to get more participation and general engagement
> if you take that route.
>
Close ... there's nothing fundamentally wrong wit the bottom-up
approach, *if* you know what you're aiming at. In other words, once you
have the theoretical framework defined, bottom-up is just fine for the
implementation ... but even though you can do design bottom-up, too, you
don't do it by starting with mock-ups implementation mock-ups -- you do
design mock-ups, a different beast entirely.
OTOH the top-down approach that Ben suggests is much easier to deal with
in this environment (id est, a mailing list). Bottom-up, in my
experience, only really works if you can lock several bods into a room
with a whiteboard, overdose them on caffeine and ... well, wait. :)
-- Brane
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Received on Mon Feb 13 17:31:04 2006