Jeff,

On Fri, 24 Aug 2007 12:55:02 -0400, Jeff Findley wrote:

>...
> The other nice thing about doing a prototype in a different language is that 
> it *stays* a prototype.  That is, you *have* to start over when you write 
> the production code.  This is a good thing, since it gives everyone the 
> opportunity to rewrite things to eliminate any mistakes or clumsiness in the 
> prototype.
> 
> If you don't throw out the prototype, it morphs into the production code, 
> often keeping a lot of code which you should have thrown away and 
> refactored.

I agree up to a point - if you've written modules to solve particular problems (say calculations of tricky items) then it makes sense to reuse these in 
the live system.  It depends on writing things in a reusable way in the first place, of course.  But changing languages means you have to rewrite 
something that was working fine, and may take quite an effort to do it an another language, with possible introduction of bugs that weren't in the 
prototype.  It rather depends what the prototype is for - a demonstration of the concept, or a first-stab at understanding the problem, or a sales tool 
(in the widest sense - you may not be showing it to customers but to people within the firm who have to agree for it to proceed).

But going on from what you say above, I've seen it worse than that - I was in charge of a team writing an Order Processing system within the firm, 
and we built a mock-up of the order entry screen - there was no logic behind it, just enough of a harness to be able to use it and see if it was what 
the users wanted.  We showed it to the manager of one of the user deparments, and got agreement that it worked the way they wanted.  When I 
said that the system would be ready in six months' time he was flabbergasted - "But you've already done it!" was his response.  He had no idea that 
the user interface was about 5% of our workload in creating the whole system.  It was then that I realised how much of a gap there was between 
what we actually did and the general public's understanding of it!  :-)

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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