Re: [xml-dev] How to be nimble, agile in the face of changingtechnologie

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

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@ccil.org
Would your name perchance be surname Puppet, given name Sock?
                --Rick Moen