[vox] [fwd] ACCU: Wednesday, June 11 - Alex Martelli, '"Good enough" is good enough!' [Mtn View]

[Bill Kendrick]

Also tomorrow:

----- Forwarded message from Ali Cehreli -----

Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 14:04:29 -0700
From: Ali Cehreli
Subject: ACCU: Wednesday, June 11 - Alex Martelli, '"Good enough" is good enough!'

   Reminder...
   When:           Wednesday, June 11, 2014
   Topic:         "Good enough" is good enough!
   Speaker:     Alex Martelli
   Time:           6:30pm doors open
                        7:00pm meeting begins
   Where:         Symantec
                        VCAFE building
                        350 Ellis Street (near E.
   Middlefield Road)
                        Mountain View, CA 94043
   Map:             <http://tinyurl.com/334rv5>
   Directions: VCAFE is accessible from the semicircular courtyard between
   Symantec buildings <http://tinyurl.com/2dccgc>
   Cost:           Free
   More Info:
   <http://www.meetup.com/SFBay-Association-of-C-C-Users/events/184685262/>

   * Description *

   Our culture's default assumption is that everybody should always be
   striving for perfection -- settling for anything less is seen as a
   regrettable compromise. This is wrong in most software development
   situations: focus instead on keeping the software simple, just "good
   enough", launch it early, and iteratively improve, enhance, and re-factor
   it. This is how software success is achieved!

   * Abstract *

   In a 1989 keynote speech at a Lisp conference, Richard Gabriel had a
   "light relief" section where he caricatured a SW development approach he
   called "worse is better" (AKA "New Jersey approach") and contrasted it
   with what he called "the right thing" (AKA "MIT/Stanford approach")... and
   despite the caricatural aspects reluctantly concluded that NJ was the most
   viable approach, identifying several of the actual reasons (speed of
   development, less monolithic designs, systems more easily adaptable to a
   variety of uses [including changes in the underlying requirements], ease
   of gradual incremental improvement over time, ...).

   The debate hasn't died down since (Gabriel himself contributing richly to
   both sides (!), sometimes under the pseudonym "Nickieben Bourbaki"). My
   favorite Gabriel quote is "The right-thing philosophy is based on letting
   the experts do their expert thing all the way to the end before users get
   their hands on it [snip] Worse-is-better takes advantage of the natural
   advantages of incremental development. Incremental improvement
   satisA-ANOTA*es some human needs".

   However, while the debate is still raging, reality has steadily been
   shifting away from "the right thing" (inherently "Cathedral"-centralized,
   with "Big Design Up Front" a must, conceived with academia and large firms
   in mind, and quite unsuited to always-shifting real-world requirements)
   and towards "the NJ approach" (suited to "Bazaar"-like structures, agile
   and iterative enhancement, dynamic start-ups and independent developers,
   in a world of always-shifting specs).

   In this talk, I come down strongly on the side of "the NJ approach",
   illustrating it and defending it on both philosophical and pragmatical
   grounds.

   I draw technical examples from several areas where the systems that won
   the "mind-share battles" did so by focusing on pragmatic simplicity ("good
   enough") to the expense of theoretical refinement and completeness (the
   quest for elusive perfection), leading to large ecosystems of developers
   bent on incremental improvement -- the TCP/IP approach to networking
   contrasted with ISO/OSI, the HTTP/HTML approach to hypertext contrasted
   with Xanadu, early Unix's simplistic (but OK) approach to interrupted
   system calls versus Multic's and ITS's perfectionism.

   Within Python, I show how metaclasses' quest for completeness yielded
   excessive complexity (and 80% of their intended uses can now be obtained
   via class decorators for 20% of the complexity), and how well incremental
   improvement worked instead in areas such as sorting, generators, and
   "guaranteed"-finalization semantics.

   The talk is not about lowering expectations: our dreams must stay big,
   bigger than we can achieve. It's about the best practical track towards
   making such dreams reality -- think grandiose, act humble. "Rightly traced
   and well ordered: what of that? // Speak as they please, what does the
   mountain care? // Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp // Or
   what's a heaven for? All's silver-grey // Placid and perfect with my art:
   the worse!"

   This talk is probably not perfect, but I do think it's good enough.

   * Speaker *

   Author of "Python in a Nutshell", co-author of "Python Cookbook", frequent
   speaker at Python conferences, once-prolific contributor to StackOverflow,
   and recipient of the 2006 Frank Willison Memorial Award for contributions
   to Python, Alex currently works as Senior Staff Engineer at Google.

   ---- Upcoming ACCU meetings -----

   Wednesday, July 9, 2014
   TBD

   Wednesday, October 8, 2014
   Greg Law, TBD

   ---------

   The ACCU meets twice monthly. Meetings are always open to the public and
   are free of charge. To suggest topics and speakers please email Ali
   Cehreli via acehreli at yahoo.com

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
-bill!
Sent from my computer