Saturday, December 08, 2007

Abstractions

The .NET Abstraction Pile:

"...you can often make a tradeoff by choosing to work at a lower level of abstraction. By doing so, your development process will move more slowly, but more of the risks will be under your control."

"I recommend approaching third party code with a great deal of suspicion. Never assume that an unknown component or platform will Just Work. A little paranoia will probably pay off later."


"Have you ever watched someone try to solve a problem in the presence of several abstractions they didn't understand? They feel helpless. Usually, they start making wild guesses about where the problem could be. I call this "stab in the dark debugging". :-)"

"I believe the technical prowess of Bill Gates was a major reason why Microsoft beat every competitor in the eighties and nineties, even though Bill probably wrote no code, no specs, and no design documents."

No comments: