Olin Lathrop wrote:

> The sloppily drawn schematic and poorly documented code are however
> indications of the design quality.  Look at how much trouble you had
> trying to figure out whether the two LEDs are lit 50% of a cycle
> apart or not.  In fact, your final conclusion was that you're still
> not sure.  There should have been a discussion about the general
> strategy and certainly there should have been a comment about what
> was actually done.  Sloppiness in one part of a design invariably
> indicates sloppiness in other parts.

Sometimes it seems you're approaching stuff like this more as a priest
than as an engineer. IMO one of the most important concepts in
engineering is "good enough". If whatever this guy had enabled him to
create a device that fits his requirements, within his budget (effort
and money), it is quite likely that spending more effort on it just
isn't worth it -- in an engineering sense, even if it's not more than a
scrap of paper with the schematic and some quickly written code.

The other question is then whether or not to publish at that point what
has been done so far. Some may think that there's a lower quality
threshold on "worth publishing", and there probably is one, but it also
seems that at least for some this is above it. Which is probably enough
to make it a good thing he did publish whatever he had -- even without
raising the documentation quality level. If it's below one's quality
threshold, by all means ignore it. IMO anything beyond this wouldn't be
engineering, it would be religion (as in "belief system").=20

Gerhard
--=20
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