I've always enjoyed reading the various Paul Graham articles pointed at by monks, and this one is no exception.

I disagree with one part of it though:

Not every kind of hard is good. There is good pain and bad pain. You want the kind of pain you get from going running, not the kind you get from stepping on a nail. A difficult problem could be good for a designer, but a fickle client or unreliable materials would not be.

While I understand his point, I think it all comes down to how you react to these minor torments. If stepping on a nail just causes you to jump around going 'ow' a lot, no great gain. If it causes you to design a new nail, or a new shoe, that'd be quite another matter.

Similarly, a fickle client gains you nothing if you just throw away and rewrite (or start to pile hack upon hack); however if it causes you to redesign your application to make it easier to respond to changing requirements that'd be a good thing.

In software, I find that simplicity and elegance often reflect good prediction - you've correctly guessed what types of flexibility will be called for in the future, and provided for them, so that the software has not degenerated into a mess of hacks as requirements have changed (as they always do).

Hugo

In reply to Good pain (was Re^2: Nice clothes ...) by hv
in thread Nice clothes (Term::ProgressBar, perltidy, Getopt::Declare) by water

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