[gavinhoward]

As someone who wrote 60 pages of design for a new VCS before writing a single line of code, I appreciate this post.

Design is crucial. The optimal time for that design may be different for different things, but I do know that incremental design can, and often does, fail.

[jcranmer]

One of the most useful skills I gained from programming competitions is the ability to write and debug an algorithm in my head. And I suspect your 60-page design document was written by essentially doing the same thing: coming up with a prototype design, and mentally testing it against the use cases to figure out if the design is workable, and committing the notes to paper only after you confirmed that it worked in your head.

[gavinhoward]

Interesting. Perhaps that is what I did.

I did do that to design the UX, but for algorithms, I am not so sure. I am really bad at coding competitions, for example.

[aidenn0]

Was that for Yore?

[gavinhoward]

Um, yeah. How do you know the name?

I have never mentioned it by name, I think. Only linked to it occasionally.

Edit: Another reason I am surprised is that Yore became its name only a few months ago.

[aidenn0]

I'll admit I had to search for the name. I recognized your username as "that Yao guy" and remembered that you were also working on a build system and VCS. Since yore is in the same repository of yao, it wasn't hard to find.

[gavinhoward]

Ah, cool!

[Archit3ch]

Your method is still incremental design, unless you started at page 1 and stopped at page 60.

[gavinhoward]

That is, in fact, what I did.

But then again, you know I was referring to Jeffries' SOP of designing while coding and refactoring incrementally.