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Using boxes is great! The beauty of coding is that those boxes don't need to be discarded, we have the virtual power to transmute them into real chairs and tabl
by neverthe_less 3y ago
Using boxes is great! The beauty of coding is that those boxes don't need to be discarded, we have the virtual power to transmute them into real chairs and tables via the power of refactoring. It's like Photoshop vs. watercolor. I'm going to sketch either way, it's just a matter of what the bar is for throwing it all out, and I think it's very often sufficient to decide in the moment in a virtual environment. That's all to say, going back to my first point, I don't need to decide ahead of time whether the code will be kept, I'm going to keep it loose either way.
And there are situations I'd go in assuming I'll probably rewrite the work, but I wouldn't set the criteria so broadly as to cover literally whatever the next large project I embark on will be, as the article suggests.
- wpietri 3y agoIf that works for you, great. But generally when I see people "keep it loose" on a prototype that then gets kept when some decision point is hit, they don't actually take the time to clean it up to production grade. And personally, although I'm very good at refactoring, I will still go the path of a disposable prototype in the future when I think it's more effective in terms of total effort. Which for me is any time I expect the prototype to yield significant information about both the surface and the substance of what we're doing.