PyMyth: Global variables are evil... WRONG!

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 2:26 AM, Tim Daneliuk <tundra at tundraware.com> wrote:
> On 11/15/2013 02:19 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> Nobody sets out to*design*  a tangled mess. What normally happens is that
>> a tangled mess is the result of*lack of design*.
>
> This has been an interesting thread - to me anyway - but this bit
> above caught my eye.  People write programs for lots of reasons -
> personal, academic, scientific, and commercial - but I actually
> don't thing the resultant messes are caused by a "lack of
> design" most of the time.  In my experience they're caused by only two
> things:
>
> 2) An evolving set of requirements.

This can be an explanation for a lack of design, but it's no less a
lack. Sometimes, something just grows organically... from a nucleus of
good design, but undesigned growth. Maybe it's time it got redesigned;
or maybe redesigning would take too much effort and it's just not
worth spending that time on something that's going to be phased out by
the next shiny thing in a couple of years anyway. Doesn't change the
fact that the current state is not the result of design, but of
disorganized feature creep. That's not necessarily a terrible thing,
but Steven's point still stands: such lack of design often results in
a tangled mess, and a tangled mess can often be blamed on lack of
design.

ChrisA