this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
413 points (94.4% liked)
Programming
16740 readers
258 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Gotta remember it was a response to water fall. Docs didn't mean the man page or the wiki, they ment the spec sheet, PowerPoint's, graphs, white papers, diagrams, aggreements and contracts, etc. Where you might go MOUNTHS making paperwork before you ran a single line of logic.
Docs SHOULD be the last resort of an engineer if your UX just can't be intuitive in some way or some problem domain just can't be simple. You should first strive to make it work well.
For example Lemmy, it just would work if you needed to read the Lemmy user guide first to post on Lemmy. That would indicate bad UX, but that was how it was back in the day.
It wasn't, Waterfall in itself was a contrived example of a bad setup. More common was UP, or something UP-like.
Never heard of UP, what is that?
Unified process, which, despite usually not being called that way and/or being codified in the way it is nowadays, is how virtually all early software companies did their development work post-punchcards (when you no longer had to get things done in a single step).
It's why the "agile is better because iterative hoooo!" is so laughable, because even though we didn't yet call it iterative - as a distinction from pre-planned, since we thought in punchcards+mainframe vs after that - we did iterative work. Of course we did, software development is naturally iterative and Waterfall was the contrived contrasting example of how a non-iterative process would look.