From: Patrick McCuller (patrick@kia.net)
Date: Fri Apr 27 2001 - 10:07:06 MDT
Still, I suspect we're getting too far away from the topic.
Let's talk about Apotheosis.
Let's assume that we can cure death forever. Is that desirable? Death comes
to all living things, particularly those that reproduce sexually. We tend to
fear death, but it brings change and change can be good.
If three-toed giant ground sloth had invented a SI, we wouldn't be here
today. The earth, even the universe might be unlimitedly better, but not for
us.
Patrick McCuller
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-sl4@sysopmind.com [mailto:owner-sl4@sysopmind.com]On Behalf
> Of Fabio Mascarenhas
> Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 11:41 AM
> To: sl4@sysopmind.com
> Subject: Re: Extreme programming
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Patrick McCuller" <patrick@kia.net>
>
>
> > A word of caution: extreme programming is not completely proven, and much
> of
> > its advice goes against 30 years of software engineering practice. That's
> not
> > to say it won't eventually be considered superior, only that there are
> other
> > methods that are known to work reasonably well now.
>
> Well, XP is kind of like a complex system. The individual practices add up
> and reinforce it other. Take the "no upfront design" rule. At first sight it
> would quickly lead to programmers coding themselves into corners, but there
> comes Refactoring to correct the design as it's being generated, and there
> comes Unit Tests so the programmer can change the code at will and know if
> it still works and what broke, and there comes Pair Programming so another
> pair of eyes can spot some mistakes, and the list goes on and on.
>
> More and more projects are trying it, so more concrete results are already
> coming.
>
> Fabio Mascarenhas
> mascarenhas@acm.org
>
>
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