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Quite the opposite, and, quite simple: engineers over-engineer thing in order to make things generic. and generic make solutions robust. that's basic science. U
by nilbot 12y ago
Quite the opposite, and, quite simple: engineers over-engineer thing in order to make things generic. and generic make solutions robust. that's basic science. Unless the problem and solution are well understood, your investment won't guarantee a return at all.
- gaius 12y agoNo, developers over-engineer because setting up a 20-node Hadoop cluster is fun, whereas doing the same task in an hour in Excel means you have to move onto some other boring task. Generic doesn't mean robust either, I don't know where you got that from,the two concepts are entirely unrelated.
- nilbot 12y agoGeneric -> robust. i... i dont know how to explain that. honestly i haven't thought about the necessity of explaining things like this. its... basic mathematics.
- gaius 12y agoI don't think these words mean what you think they mean. Like "science" and "mathematics".
- TickleSteve 12y agoGeneric != Robust. It can quite easily be the opposite, they are certainly orthogonal concepts.
- JustSomeNobody 12y agoI'm sorry, but if you cannot explain it, you simply do not understand it yourself. That's harsh, I get it, and I'm truly sorry, but that's a basic fact.
- JabavuAdams 12y agoThis smacks of an unexamined bias. Or maybe we're not using the words to mean the same things?
- JustSomeNobody 12y agoGeneric, by default, does not in any way make things more robust. We've gone from engineering solutions to meet specific problems to engineering solution frameworks that (supposedly) will solve the problem and allow for any unknowns. The problem is, no matter how hard the engineer tries, he can never anticipate the unknowns to the extent that the application framework can support all of them. We should go back to solving the specific problem at hand. In both scenarios you get the customer who wants a feature that absolutely doesn't fit with the current application, therefore a rewrite is necessary. And with the specific solution, you don't have nearly the man hours wasted.
- JabavuAdams 12y agoNo. Look to safety-critical software for intuition on why. Simpler is more reliable. Also, it's hard to know enough about a problem to make a generic solution until you've solved the problem 2-3 times already. But ... having solved a problem multiple times increases the risk that you will be biased towards seeing new problems as some instance of the old problem and therefore applying unsuitable "generic" solutions.