Re: Application Design

[Francis Norton <francis@redrice.com>]

Hi Len,

"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:
> 
> Unfortunately, they do.  Usually I see this
> where to-the-metal programmers learn
> just enough to connect the new
> to what they already know.   

That's the way I've seen it happen. The more competent the programmer is
the more likely they are to fall into this trap - I think because the S
stands for stylesheet they assume that anything associated with it is
slow and ugly. (And that's why I try to remember to use xsl:transform
instead of xsl:stylesheet, pedantic as it may be.)

> XPath isn't trivial to learn
> on the first pass, and if they practice solo Extreme,
                                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^
Yes - boring old consultants do requirements and use cases and test
plans (which don't actually hurt that much if you got the use cases
right) but there is always a temptation for good coders to just hack it,
and it's even stronger for ace coders. But if it turns out they didn't
understand the user requirement in the first place, or they hand it over
to another coder - well, it's hubris for hackers, in the original sense
of both words ...

Francis.