From: Todd Gillespie <toddg@...>
Date: 2001-09-17T05:54:48+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:21272] Re: alternate Download-Site of IOWA?

On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Hal E. Fulton wrote:

> > I used to carefully design sites.  Now I just throw out whatever I have on
> > my mind, and the angry feedback evolves a redesign faster than anything
> > else I can come up with.
> 
> Now *there's* a design philosophy.

It works, too.  Keeps one on the straight and narrow path of user
relevance.  Particularly on the web, where teams will labor for months in
silence before delivering a finely-crafted web site that absolutely no one
cares about.  Whilst sheltered from users it's easy to forget that if you
have anything worth saying then plain text is fine, but if you don't then
all the design in the world can't help you.

> Reminds me of the "worse is better"
> school of thought (can't remember who came up with that). Or maybe

Richard P. Gabriel.

> even like a cathedral/bazaar situation, where frustrated complaining
> users drive the design... :)

Perhaps, but Gabriel explains in "Mob Software: the Erotic Life of
Code" that the central metaphor, the cathedral, is used
misunderstood.  Successive generations of architects overseeing a single
cathedral had no common plan, no written documentation.  They shared a
design pattern, and an understanding of Quality.  Read Christopher
Alexander.  The cathedrals were more like an educated bazaar than the
order that ESR supposes.


> >
> > "If one studies too zealously, one easily loses his pants." -- A. Einstein
> >
> 
> A very quotable quote. Is it genuine, and what is the context and
> meaning?

Dunno.  It sounds sufficiently dada to make me wonder if his English at
the time was not fully fleshed out with familiar idioms.


Any view of things that is not strange is false - Neil Gaiman, Sandman