Of course I'm the kind of guy who looks at a kludgy app and yells "Backhoe !" <bg>
>I agree. My conference sessions this year are all about making the right decisions and how we can do things correctly. One presentation is called "Software Gardening". It starts out by discussing that software development is not like construction, but more like gardening. Code needs to be nurtured, pruned, replanted, and sometimes composted. I've seen statistics that the average application is rewritten every four versions. And it's mainly because the care and nurturing of the code wasn't there.
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>>That's why I tend to favor rewrites over fixits if the app I'm supposed to fix is fundamentally flawed - or was just never really designed but was just cobbled together. When I did a lot of VFP rescue work, I ran into resistance until I demonstrated that with a framework in place and a revisiting of requirements it was often cheaper and definitely yielded a better result to just do it right.
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>>Sometimes the old app - or code - isn't bad so much as the design is inappropriate and is something one will just have to keep fighting if you don't take a step back and fix it. A bad code module can be refactored, but a bad data design is forever <s>
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
