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RE: The myth of 80/20

• To: 'Eric van der Vlist' <vdv@d...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: The myth of 80/20
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 11:11:22 -0600

It isn't what you meant, but is a result of 
that kind of meaning.   What we consider YAGNI 
today are often exactly the features we need 
to stay competitive.  So you are right and 
so am I.

What is fascinating is how very little the 
Eric Raymond's of the web world actually 
changed anything with regards to the dominance 
of the players.  Shirkey got it right with 
his comment on the market having no incentive 
to conserve cheap resources.  What happens 
is that once expensive resources become cheaper 
in the computer industry in a way that nature 
does not emulate.  Evolution in nature works 
on the basis of very long timescales.

Programmers and specification authors have two 
very distinctly different jobs and their niches 
are competitive with each other.

len


From: Eric van der Vlist [mailto:vdv@d...]

On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 17:23, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> It's easy to conceive of why 80/20 dominates given 
> incomplete or ambiguous requirements and such.  Just 
> remember that the alternative is to do all the work 
> under one root, and in our world, that means a framework 
> capable of subsuming all of the objects needed to 
> paint that screen and keep updating it from data stores.

That's not really what I meant. 

80/20 is fine except that we usually have no measurement to evaluate on
which side of the 80/20 frontier a feature is and 80/20 becomes just an
easy way to reject features we don't like.

Digression: for programmers an alternative to 80/20 is XP (extreme
programming). Unfortunately that doesn't seem easy to adapt for
specification authors.

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