[NCLUG] programming question

[S. Luke Jones]

I've only been skimming this article, but this jumped out...

J. Paul Reed wrote:
> Really, it's the separation of the architects from the carpenters... not to
> belittle either.
>
> I've been a member of dev teams which have really, REALLY good designers,
> but they can't code their own linked-list... and then there are people who
> can read those designs, and write really tight, maintainable, awesome
> code... but if they had to design it from scratch, that'd make all sorts of
> design errors resulting in problems down the road.

...and I felt compelled to chime in.  What Paul describes here is IMHO
unacceptable. It might be the state of the art, or prevailing industry
practice, but that doesn't make it right, or for that matter practical.

There's this N-year old fantasy in the industry that you can have coders
and architects (i.e. cheap people and expensive people) and so far as I
can tell, it's never been proven to be effective. If you aren't any good
at implementing, I'll wager your design is crap. If you can't design,
then the best you can hope for is an unmaintainable mess.

(That's another problem, BTW: throwing in the towel and rewriting the
unmaintainable mess, when it should simply (or, if necessary,
difficult-ly) be fixed.  But that's a separate problem, and
refactoring was already mentioned in this thread.)

-- 
Luke Jones = luke/vortex/frii/fullstop/com