On 29/03/07, Russell Wallace <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think there's at least one good practical reason to avoid doing that, or at least to do it at arm's length in a "potential users discussing potential features" mailing list rather than "here's our code as we write it". In the early stages of something as bleeding-edge as this, it's normal to need several rounds of scrapping and redoing major chunks of design; if you don't/can't do that, if you have to go with whatever your first guess was, it's easy to end up hamstrung later because the design doesn't really handle the requirements and it's too late to rewrite from scratch. It's psychologically a lot easier to do that sort of scrap-and-redo if the world isn't looking over your shoulder.
The process of invention inevitably involves scrapping designs when they reach a point where it's obvious that they're not going to work. This is especially a problem for AI systems, where even the theoretical basis underlying the project is subject to uncertainty, whereas if you're just writing a web browser all the theory of basically what it should do is completely known from the outset. I've lost count of the number of times which I've scrapped and re-written some of my own projects, but by now I think I've made most of the mistakes which its possible to make, and as they say "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
