From: mathew <meta@...>
Date: 2006-01-16T07:27:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Design contracts and refactoring (was Re: mathn: ugly warnings)

*Dean Wampler *<deanwampler gmail.com>
> The XP philosophy is that if you implement more functionality than is
> required, then you are wasting time and resources.
That may be an appropriate attitude for commercial software, but not for 
someone writing an open source library for Ruby.

Do you really think it better that we have 4 or 5 XML parsers which all 
partially work, well enough for their respective authors' use? Or that 
we have one that actually works?

> I won't believe a statement about what's supported unless the tests
> prove it.

Since unit tests (as currently implemented) can only demonstrate 
presence of support, and since you discount documentation, presumably 
your attitude is that there's no such thing as a statement that 
something is not supported?

In which case, don't use my code...

More philosophically: "a statement of non-support is not the same as the 
lack of a statement of support", and vice versa. But if you accept that, 
the XP dogma comes crashing down.


mathew