Pragmatic Interview on Slashdot

03/26/2003

A posting about our latest Artima interview is now up on Slashdot. As usual for Slashdot, a number of posters seriously misunderstood the article, but a few kindred souls got it, including this great quote by renehollan:

_Andy Hunt: But for me personally, almost every time I’ve taken that extra care to make a system flexible, it has saved me. There’s an effect that I’ve named (what else) “Hollan’s Law”: The likelihood of something changing is directly proportional to the intensity of the argument that it never will. Thus, when we see something in code that looks like it might need to be malleable, it probably will be._ Hollan hits the nail on the head; if our experience tells us that something is likely to be volatile, better listen to it! More on these ideas of metadata and flexibility are presented in our next IEEE Computer construction article, due out shortly.