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On Sat, Aug 25, 2007 at 01:23:02PM +0100, Howard Winter wrote:
> > 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).

In my case Pure Data is actually standard way to do that sort of app. My
argument with the prototype was really more that we can easilly replace
it *if* we need too, not that we *will* replace it.

Now that I think of it I suspect much of that engineers complaint might
have been due to him not knowing Pure Data... or maybe, that everyone
else, even the non-technical people, did.

> 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!  :-)

There's actually a windows GUI library out there called something along
the lines of "sketch" that replaces all the standard GUI elements with
ones that are fully functional, but look like they were hand drawn on
paper.

I think you can guess the usefullness of it. :)

- -- 
http://petertodd.org
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