I think that both extremes are rarely good.. in other words, if you just "cut and try" constantly without any real analysis of your design up-front, then the end result is likely to be full of holes and hidden bugs, and the approach is just intellectually sloppy. On the other hand, if you spend huge amounts of time to get it all correct prior to the first actual test, then the total development time is likely to be much longer than if you had included a small number of analyze-design-test-debug cycles. I remember once doing a design (back in high school) where I was writing code for a microcontroller (actually an 8088 in minimal mode) and the code was going to be written into an EPROM by someone else, after which it had to work the first time because I didn't have an EPROM programmer or eraser. The code was only about 50 instructions long. I spent about 1 full week simulating and analyzing it before I gave it to the guy to program into the EPROM for me. It did indeed work the first time, but the amount of effort was about 1 hour per ASM instruction :) That really cannot be extended to much larger projects. On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 9:43 PM, William "Chops" Westfield wrote: > > On Oct 14, 2011, at 12:01 PM, Dave Tweed wrote: > >> Are we as a society gradually losing this level of technical skill? > > Probably. =A0People can't write near-perfect fortran on a coding pad, > suitable to be handed off to a cardpunch operator, either. > > What's the world coming to! > > BillW > > -- > http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive > View/change your membership options at > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist > --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .