Re: PG: Hackers and Painters

["Neil W. Van Dyke" <address@hidden>]

Noel Welsh <noelwelsh@yahoo.com> writes at 05:59 15-May-2003 -0700:
> For example, recently I was reading someone else's Scheme code.  That
> had a consistent regexp-match idiom they used like so:

I understand they'd had a note to make a macro for that in version 0.2,
and had intentionally left the code in that form so that it would be
easier to convert to the macro (once they'd encountered a number of
examples and figured out exactly what generalization would be most
useful).  I understand they also wanted to avoid making the small
reusable library in question dependent (from both resource usage and
manageability perspectives) on a substantial pattern-matching library.
Oh, they actually submitted example implementations of the desired
macros yesterday. :)

In pair programming, the programmer could've interrupted his train of
thought to explain his thinking at that precise moment.  Better, he
could've explained the current/working idea/rationale once he got to a
good checkpoint in his own problem-solving process (via, say, email,
documentation, or a meeting).

Your numerous comments were appreciated, by the way, Noel, and I'm glad
they happened when I was at a checkpoint, rather than with us duct-taped
to the same pair-programming keyboard. :)

-- 
                                             http://www.neilvandyke.org/