Sherri Malouf wrote:
> But my main question about this was referenced by several people. Here
> was a seemingly benign issue which may cause a lot of chaos in a couple of
> years. How could the sw programmers have know that their software would
> still be running AND how many actually thought of the implications? One
> of my questions goes back to one I have stated in several different ways
> and in several different threads! How do you hold the small pieces (ie:
> two digits of a date) and the larger picture (whatever the larger
> programming project is) and the future??? Most of us don't think this way
> but we need to be doing it now! We seem to be able to generalize -- oops
> we blew it -- but we don't seem to be able to apply the learning...
Sherri, I've written a lot of code in my day and I can tell you from sad
experience you never think of every possible scenario; software is never
finished, it is just evolving. For example, on one project I was near
completion. I had about 50,000 lines of code written; a minor change in
the next version of the operating system I was working with caused me
significant grief (I just hadn't expected things to change the way they
did); and so I spent another four months adding another 20,000 lines of
code to make the adjustment. And when the program was ready to release, I
said to myself: "I'm not scared by what I know about this program; I'm
scared by what I don't know about it." To me, it was a living thing. . .it
had a life all its own. I wrote it, but I wasn't sure "I knew it."
-- Ben Compton The Accidental Learning Group Work: (801) 222-6178 Improving Business through Science and Art bcompton@geocities.com http://www.e-ad.com/ben/BEN.HTMLearning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>