

The Rise of SYDNI or YAGNI is Only About Problems, not Solutions - j_baker
http://jasonsupdates.posterous.com/the-rise-of-sydni-or-yagni-is-only-about-prob

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russell
Sometimes You Do Need It vs. You Ain't Gonna Need It. I suppose he is arguing
Einstein's make it as simple as possible but no simpler. I look at YAGNI as a
filter not a hard and fast design principle. When starting a non trivial
project, I sketch out the design and requirements. Then I apply YAGNI to
eliminate the cruft and those features that are nice to have but would delay
the first release.

~~~
j_baker
There's no vs here. :-)

SYDNI and YAGNI are 100% complimentary. I just chose the name partly because I
think YAGNI gets a disproportionate amount of attention due to having a catchy
acronym.

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__david__
Quote from the article:

 _Which life support machine would you rather be hooked up to?_

 _1\. A machine whose software developers always did the simplest thing
possible_

 _2\. A machine whose software developers went out of their way to anticipate
possible problems and planned for each of them_

I don't think that is an apt description of what YAGNI is about. I think the
choices would be more like:

1\. A machine whose software developers always did the simplest thing possible

2\. A machine whose software developers went out of their way to abstract the
code for possible future expansion, uses a custom rule engine written in a
custom domain specific scripting language that is compiled down to XML and
finally loaded into an SQL server database cluster with failover support.

To me, that is the kind of over-engineering that YAGNI is all about.

~~~
j_baker
This is a very valid point. However, please bear in mind that I wasn't
addressing the _application_ of YAGNI as much as I was addressing the
_misapplication_ of YAGNI.

