Re: Copy / Paste in software development
On Feb 14, 11:33 pm, jacob navia <ja...@nospam.org> wrote:
James Kanze wrote:
Two pieces of bullshit in one paragraph. I've yet to see
any competent programmer use goto, and I've yet to see any
competent programmer use copy/paste. (And I've implemented
more than a few finite state machines.)
Great.
If you read the original message however, it seems that the
programmer of your genetic code (the code you are running) has
used extensively copy/paste to replicate entire portions of an
ape genome around 5-7 million years ago, to modify them later.
That was the point of my message.
You would treat the unknown tinkerer as "incompetent"?
Maybe cut/paste does work :-)
If you've got millions of years to get the program working, can
afford to throw out 99% or more of the programs you write, and
don't mind having a lot of excess baggage only relevant to
earlier versions, maybe. Most companies I've worked for would
not consider generating random variations, testing them, and
then only keeping the ones that worked, an acceptable
development methodology. (Although... it sounds an awful lot
like `test-deiven design'. But I don't think that even its
proponents are arguing for random modifications---and most of
them seem to insist strongly on refactoring, eliminating
redundancies.)
--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
Conseils en informatique orient=E9e objet/
Beratung in objektorientierter Datenverarbeitung
9 place S=E9mard, 78210 St.-Cyr-l'=C9cole, France, +33 (0)1 30 23 00 34