SPUG: software libertarianism (was: Scope question)

[Asim Jalis]

dancerboy <dancerboy at strangelight.com> wrote:
> BTW, it's somewhat unreasonable to complain that
> a project was killed by "changing specs".  Specs
> *always* change!  Part of one's job as a
> developer is to create an architecture that's
> flexible enough to accommodate changing specs.
> Yes, there are reasonable, minor spec changes
> and unreasonable, radical spec changes.  But
> part of my point is that working in a language
> like Java can make it much more likely that
> you'll be able to accommodate even radical spec
> changes in large-scale applications.

This is a good point, if I can say that without
taking a position in this Perl-vs-Java smackdown
:-)

Perl's permissiveness with object fields and also
its lack of method prototyping makes changing the
code a frightening experience. 

The interpreter does not care if I change the
number of parameters to a method and forget to fix
some of the calls. It also does not care if I
rename a field in half my code but forget to
rename it in a few places. 

While there are some solutions to this they are
all fat. Class::Multimethods and Class::Struct
make classes slow and expensive to use. It would
be nice if these features were supported in raw
Perl through something like "use strict".

Asim

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