Slight digression… I think this conversation is pretty much the rational, reasonable version of most of programming.reddit:
* "this is how I work"
* "fool! You should be doing TDD/AOP/Agile/XP/NIH/WTF/BBQ!"
* "actually, that's not possible for reasons X, Y, Z."
The problem is that the respondent always assumes that the writer of the original post is in the same environment, subject to the same conditions. There's a name for this fallacy, but I don't remember it.
A similar problem is when posters assume that their situation is the typical one: I see this all the time as people post stories like "how to do X", omitting the crucial phrase "... in Ruby", or "in the web development world", or "on Windows". Knocking them down with "I think you'll find telecoms is a little different" seems to be a habit of mine.
Comments
Slight digression… I think this conversation is pretty much the rational, reasonable version of most of programming.reddit:
* "this is how I work"
* "fool! You should be doing TDD/AOP/Agile/XP/NIH/WTF/BBQ!"
* "actually, that's not possible for reasons X, Y, Z."
The problem is that the respondent always assumes that the writer of the original post is in the same environment, subject to the same conditions. There's a name for this fallacy, but I don't remember it.
A similar problem is when posters assume that their situation is the typical one: I see this all the time as people post stories like "how to do X", omitting the crucial phrase "... in Ruby", or "in the web development world", or "on Windows". Knocking them down with "I think you'll find telecoms is a little different" seems to be a habit of mine.