On Mon, April 30, 2007 8:57 pm, Adrian Bunk wrote: > I never expected the reality to be come as white as my ideal or the > washed things in washing powder ads.
This reminds me very much of what the brilliant computing scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra more than once wrote: `Confusing "love of perfection" with "claim of perfection", people will accuse you of the latter and then blame you for the first.' (EWD709) Also relevant to the discussion, I think, but in another way, is this: `One of them is the dogma that striving for perfection is counterproductive in the sense that it would make software development much too expensive. But what are the main causes of the soaring costs of software development? A major cost, in terms of both manpower and unforeseen delays, is debugging, and one can save a lot by investing more in preventing the bugs from entering the design in the first place. Since the errors are so expensive, in general the high-quality design is also by far the cheaper. Another major cause is that many systems are built on shifting foundations in the sense that the underlying software of operating systems and compilers is too shaky to be stable, with the result that each new release of that underlying software requires possibly extensive adaptation of what has been built on top of it. Finally, many of the tools the programmer is supposed to work with are so poorly documented that they force him to find out by experiment what they might be able to do for him. Since these experiments can be pretty expensive and time-consuming and —inductive reasoning being what it is— an educated guess is the best the poor programmer can hope for, the poor programmer is really in a miserable position. So here you see three major sources of cost explosion traced down to someone's assumption that striving for perfection is counterproductive!' (EWD952) For the complete documents, see http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD07xx/EWD709.html and http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD952.html, respectively. Regards from Vegard's - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/