Re: [school-discuss] Free-Open Baccalaureate Idea

[Yishay Mor <y.mor@ioe.ac.uk>]

> Yes, kind of.  It also tries to tell apart vision from planning,
> warning about the latter.
I agree with both.  I guess my list might have looked like a requirement 
spec, but that's just my writing habits.  It was just there to 
demonstrate the kind of issues we should have in mind.

> (BTW, I was not criticizing in any way.)
Oh, but you should.  Without critique there is no quality.

As for throwaway vs. designed, I like to quote the story of "Make" vs. 
"Ant".

(I should get the details strait, if I want to use this story)
"Make" was created by one guy who was tired of having to repeatedly 
manually run various compilation and build management chores. He wrote a 
quick utility to read a configuration file and run these chores for him. 
Because he was just experimenting with the idea, and writing for his 
own use, he didn't pay much attention to the file format.  He use a 
syntax which was easiest for him to write a parser for.

Because he found the program useful, he sent the sources to some 
friends, who where so happy with it they sent it to all their friends, 
etc.  Soon "make" was in use on practically every Unix system in the 
world, and the one thing you couldn't change was the file format.

Ant was developed as a Jakarta project to be all that Make is not.  It 
has an XML file format which is easily readable and editable by humans 
and applications alike.  It was designed to be modular, so that a small 
set of core task were implemented quickly, and other tasks added as time 
went on.

Personally, I don't believe that good large systems can "emerge" without 
any vision or design.  I do believe in "Start small, start easy, and 
above all start now.'' .  My approach is that even when you're writing a 
small, throwaway program - first think of the next thing you would do, 
and try to design an architecture that would address that as well.

Always remember "make".

best,

- Yishay

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Yishay Mor
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