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2007-03-11

Specialization is for Insects

I’ve become a regular reader of Oren Eini’s blog, “Ayende @ Rahien.”  Although I don’t toil in the same developer space as Oren, I find that his introspective illustrations of methodology and technique yield little diamonds every day.  His attention to testing is heart-warming.

Today, in a theme-titled post, there is this great observation:

“I expect to see a lot more work going into building non leaky abstractions in the future, and I think that we are getting better and better at it. Furthermore, I believe we will see a lot more emphasis on Not Surprising The Developer.”

I think it is more than that.  We must stop Surprising the User (including the Developer special-case), for all of the same reasons.  It seems to me that plugging-up the abstractions, and knowing how to have them fail appropriately when fail they must, is a perfect agenda for conquering the complexity that we have unleashed on the world in the name of mastering complexity.

There’s a lot more in Oren’s post and I recommend that you digest all of it (and then subscribe to his RSS feed).

posted by orcmid at 3/11/2007 11:51:00 AM, rating data by NewsGator Online