Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Perl Destroys Interview Question

[ihb]

How does this play along with XP (Extreme Programming)? I'm not too familiar with XP myself nor do I have any experience in it, but to my understanding you shouldn't make the general solution if you want to be an extreme programmer. The reason for that would be that it's likely that the spec would be altered in such a way that even your general solution wouldn't solve the new problem. Then you've solved something that wasn't a problem for you to solve, and hence done unnecessary work. The planning for the future would be done by other techniques (such as having well refactored code).

This is how i interpret the XP philosophy. I may very well be wrong. Please correct me if so.

ihb

[mr_mischief]

My understanding of XP suggests you're right. However, no methodology is 100% right in every situation.

I think that doing a great deal of work to generalize something when there's no need is obviously silly. There's no reason though to do something in a less general way which doesn't run any faster and requires just as much work to implement. I'm talking about looking at the problem as a more general case, not about working a more general case into the code as an afterthought.