Re: PG: Hackers and Painters

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

I'm in favor of reinvention -- sometimes we just have to go through the
exercise of invention to understand something well, even if it's already
been done by someone else.

We might even come up with a better solution, especially if we come from
a different background or if conditions have changed.

But it's important to keep a healthy dose of humility when advocating
our newfound insight.  Just like the relative old-fogies need to have
humility wrt new ideas and changing conditions.

The concrete example that (I'm a bit embarrassed) seems to be my hot
button at the moment: the more exhuberant of the young XP evangelists
I've talked with need to understand that I'm not going to bet a project,
team, and/or company on this new popular methodology they advocate when
they can't tell me why it's superior to other methodologies for the
current conditions.  (If they tell me that requirements analysis or
architecture is "too" hard, for example, the response is: that's why we
invested in learning how to do it, and we had good reasons for that
investment; it's not like we didn't start out doing seat-of-the-pants
hacking and interactive/iterative development.  Then argue from there.)

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