Bacon Driven Coding

There’s been some scuttlebutt recently on the extreme programming mailing list about the value of YAGNI — You Aren’t Going to Need It. Apparently, some people have been interpreting it as “Don’t think about the future.” It’s supposed to be “Don’t build things today that you don’t need today.”

If you know that someday, down the road, you may have to support multiple platforms, It’s entirely reasonable to choose OpenGL over Direct3D — OpenGL will run on Windows, Macs, and X platforms, where Direct3D will only run on Windows.

Contrariwise, if you’re only releasing on Windows this version, there’s no reason to build that classic hierarchy of GenericWindowInterface—->MSWindowsInterface today. You Aren’t Going to Need it. When we do a Mac build, then we’ll add that.

Anyway, here’s my replacement analogy for YAGNI: We only need ten yards. (For those not familiar with American football, the team gets four chances to move the ball ten yards. When you have moved the ball ten yards, this process resets, and you get another four chances to move the ball ten yards. Eventually, you’ll make it over the goal line and score points, but that’s later; This play is to get ten yards. A yard is just slightly shorter than a meter.)

So when someone says, “We need to add extensibility hooks here in case we want to offer plugins later,” you can reply, “We only need ten yards.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Thinking about code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.