in reply to XY Problem

In case you thought this is a new problem you might want to read the first chapter of Jon Bently's book Programming Pearls (ISBN 0201657880) that was originally published in 1989. In article Cracking the Oyster starts with: "The programmer's question was simple ... my mistake was to answer his question". He then goes on to discuss how he gets at the programmer's real problem.
-- gam3
A picture is worth a thousand words, but takes 200K.

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Re^2: XY Problem
by Anonymous Monk on May 04, 2008 at 17:22 UTC
    New? 1989? I started programming as a H.S. student in 1965 and it wasn't much later that I first encountered and identified the problem of fellow students asking how to do something that wasn't really what they wanted to do. Later, as a professional, I learned that this was codified in the notion of requirements ... something that most hackers don't seem to know much about.
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