Re: [xml-dev] It is okay for things to break in the future!

[Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>]

Hi Folks,

Sorry, I don’t agree with the posts.

Here are examples that posters gave of things that developers have failed to account for:

-	Didn’t account for London temperature rising to 40 degrees Celsius
-	Didn’t account for employees over 90 years old
-	Didn’t account for extensive use of international phone calls
-	Didn’t account for workers under 16 years of age
-	Didn’t account for last names containing a hyphen

There is a difference between:

-	Failing to understand the current world and then writing incorrect and/or incomplete code
-	Not knowing the future

My post was about the latter, not the former.

Damian actually gave an excellent example of the latter: Suppose in 1970 you created code to validate phone numbers. You could not have anticipated the arrival of mobile phones 30 years later. When mobile phones did arrive, you really want to know. You really want your validation code to fail. Whatever world view you had in 1970, it changed radically by 2000. A lot of changes will be needed in the system, validation code being one of them. 

/Roger