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Admin
Ha Ha, everybody would know its April fools day for sure. First ?
Admin
priceless. And also, scarily familiar from some of the RAD / Agile evangelism that's out there.
You know, I might even learn to be a fan of FAD - it makes a lot of sense! You're coding for the customer, so you do what you can to keep the customer happy. No-one expects software to work properly anymore, so why waste time trying to write software that does work? Write software that looks / acts how the customers expect, than patch functionality later! It makes sense!! BRILLANT!!!
Admin
Someone is totally going to be at lunch with their coworkers today evangelizing about this awesome new approach they read about known as FAD. "Maybe we should give it a try? Sounds like a no bullshit, down to earth approach.. and there are no marketing buzzwords like 'scrum'. What is that anyway? Sounds like a medical term for goat genitals."
Seriously. :l
At any rate, well done!
Admin
I for one am appalled at the new direction the site has taken, evangelising inappropriate-sounding software methodologies and adding lolcats. Everything is the last straw, I've had enough, I'm deleting my bookmark and terminating my RSS feed and drilling my hard-disk and feeding my testicles to a shark. I hope you're happy.
Admin
The Real WTH is that this still hits close to home. April Fools indeed.
Admin
Yup, far too close for comfort.
Might send that around on the internal list, actually...
Admin
Must be April Fools everyday where I work...
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You think that's funny, but that's basically how it works at my job.
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I gotta say, this would probably beat 90% of the software environments I've worked in.
Admin
feels like what I am doing every day.. shit my workplace is a just joke
Admin
Ooooh... all this and epiphanies too!
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RAD was just a fad. Scrum was just a fad. FAD is the new paradigm.
Admin
Finally! A sensible design methodology. The certification will look great next to my Works On My Machine badge.
Admin
Alex, you sir, are a genius. You have given me the ultimate response to every support call and trouble ticket I receive today:
LEARN TO DEAL!!
Printer not working........Learn to deal. Application crashing.......Learn to deal. Network down...............Learn to deal.
Employees displeased with new tech support paradigm....
LEARN TO DEAL BITCHES!!!! YOU'RE IN MY WORLD NOW!!!!
MWUAAAAHAHAHA!!!
Admin
And now that I'm thinking about it I know a desktop search tool that would be perfect for this library!
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Sounds great, where can I buy the book?
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FAD isn't new.
It's clearly is the dominant programming paradigm in the world today.
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And right under that "Test? Well... It compiled without errors." plaque...
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No book! Learn to DEAL!
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Hey Alex! I recently tried to get a job at a FAD-using company, so I could get the experience, so I could take the exam for the cert. But they wouldn't hire me 'cuz I didn't have the cert yet! Will the FAD University of Certificate Keepers and Educational Doctrinaires accept open-source contributions done using FAD?
Admin
God, I love this site! Kudos, Alex!
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Alex,
I would like to work with you on creating the For Dummies book for this ground-breaking new paradigm. I also think we can schedule several lucrative seminars at various Computer Science programs at Universities all around the country. You are sitting on a gold mine here.
Personally, I intend to switch our department over to FAD immediately. It will certainly be a big improvement over having that sweaty ape Jenkins hovering over me all the time during our Extreme Programming sessions.
Admin
The real worse than hailure is that designing the interface first is included in this list. It's actually a pretty good idea: after all, as far as the users are concerned, the interface is the software. The important thing is to base the design on observed user needs and characteristics.
Admin
If this is meant to be a parody on Agile as some have suggested, it illustrates that they don't really have any idea of what Agile is about.
Other than that, good stuff.
Admin
The really scary part is that a person could make a boatload of money selling FAD consulting services, because the central tenet actually is true: clients care about looks, not functionality.
Admin
Looking forward to the Buenos Aires meeting; I already have the tickets and hotel booked!
Also, for the next site-name change I nominate "The Daily WTF"--for "Worse Than FAD."
Admin
Yes, it's very similar to agile development...
No wait, agile actually promotes sound design. It's just you being stupid.
Admin
Does HYPE.VHelper.HTML have a Blink function? 'Cuz users love blink! Make sure it works across all browsers, emulating it with Javascript, Java, Flash, and even auto-reloading the page every second. You know, whatever it takes.
Admin
So in other words FAD is TPP? Typical PHP Programmer?
Admin
God, you wish you were funny.
Admin
Actually I think the whole "design user interface first"-concept is a very good idea. The user will be experiencing the work processes in the application and find out whether it matches his or her requirements.
Obviously you should develop a solid back-end - with a maintainable structure - after the user has confirmed that the application is, indeed, what they need. This is the step where most developers fail.
Admin
hahah i totally agree.
Jeez, I entered this job as programmer 1 year ago, and they DO work like this (except for the "deal with it". We fix things)
However I was good enough to change things and now im working in an OOP style ^^. Thank god I was allowed to apply massive programming changes.
Admin
Interface first is actually a good idea. The interface is the program for the user, so build the code around it.
Admin
For those who missed the point(TM), I was having a stab at paradigm evangelism in general, not RAD or Agile development in particular (they're just the examples I personally have heard most evangelism of). Agile is (essentially) just another buzz paradigm. Your software is as good as your code, not your development paradigm. If you're a bad coder, you will develop as badly in an agile environment as in a FAD one.
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Actually you're too late Alex - FAD has already been relegated to the museum.
Grand Theft Auto 3 was designed by whiteboard according to the FAD method. That whiteboard is now exhibited as a historical piece at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
Word is that the industry is looking now for the new FAD.
Admin
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You all missed the boat on this one. Yes, there are coders who take this kind of "just make it work" approach to extremes. But overcompensation (i.e. over-architecting) is far more common. It's also far more fun to mock the over-architects (who really, really take themselves seriously) than it is to mock the under-architects (who really, really want to get out the door at 5PM and don't care if Rockford Lhotka is impressed).
I mean, I've got a lot more real successes on my resume than our "architect" here. There's a happy medium to be found and I think Daily WTF as a community is wrong about which way the pendulum needs to swing.
Admin
I'm sorry, but I don't see the humor in this.
Admin
That sounds worryingly familiar.
Admin
Great! They can use my Forward Action Recursive Templates on the backend! (double score)
Admin
I love this. The only thing missing is a condemnation of using comments anywhere in the code. All code should be self-documenting, using an ever-shifting, undocumented variable naming system that is inconsistent between developers, projects, and individual sections of code.
Comments are for kids in college. scoff Don't even get me started on shop standards. They just slow people down when they should be Learning To Deal instead.
Admin
I am sold! where do i sign up?
Admin
Hmmmm.
Front Ahead Design (FAD) is ok.
But I'm more comfortable with Never Ahead Design System (NADS).
The beauty of NADS is that you're never expected to "catch up". You're always going to be behind the curve so it's not a big deal.
And kick-starting a project in the NADS is something to behold. Preferably from a distance.
Admin
You know, the beginning of this actually makes a lot of sense. It had me fooled until about point V of the manifesto.
Designing the front-end first is actually a pretty nifty idea in many cases. It reminds you of what is actually relevant and keeps you from wasting too much time on isignificant details. It can also keep you from designing your middle-ware/backend in a way that just won't solve the problem, or can solve it but not in a well-performing or sound way, or is just too generic and thus too far detached from the actual problem domain. Not too mention the HCI advantages.
Point II - well, the real world forces that on you anyway.
Point III - This is where it starts getting strange to me. There's still some truth to it, though. Many people over-estimate the complexity of their problem. They then throw every design pattern they know of at the problem and end up with a huge bundle of software that only goes to reinforce their earlier believe that they'd need a big and complex design. Had they gone with the down-to-earth no-bullshit approach, they may have ended up with something a tenth of the size. It may have a few WTFs in there, but it's still easier to read, handle and maintain, simply on account of its size.
OTOH, there's also situations where the problem /is/ /that/ complex, and the simplistic approach just won't cut it. But wisdom is not evangelizing one of these approaches over the other, it's knowing which one you should go with for which problem.
Point IV - Diagrams and such are a means of communications between developers. Sometimes you can just throw them away after you made your point. Sometimes they accumulate over time and don't get updated ever, forming an enormous mountain of information that makes it really hard to find those rare few gems that are relevant, up-to-date and answer questions that couldn't be as easily answered by looking at the source and/or using common sense.
Personally, I'm partial to documenting only big picture issues that are unlikely to change any time soon, and otherwise relying on well-structured source code with talking function-/class-/variable names and using comments to document all the "why"s and all the code snippets that aren't obvious at first glance anyway to someone who knows the language well. Also, everything that resembles a communication protocol (even if it's in files) between bigger components of the software absolutely must be documented in detail. Same goes for database layouts and file formats for anything that stores important data.
The rest of the article is just plain April 1st material. Point VI is - IMO - in direct contradiction with Point II. (If it doesn't work, you have not solved the problem!) Point VII - Recipe for big-time desaster.
The HYPE framework - a copy-paste library? The mind boggles. I've done the copy-paste thing a number of times in the past (because it was quicker than making a real library) and it's always come back to bite me in the ass. Usually in terms of discovering a bug somewhere and having to go through all the code where I copied the stuff and fix it everywhere individually. It's even worse when it's had individual changes in the other places, because you have to wrap your mind around the old code again, to make sure you don't accidentally break anything with your fix. Not to mention that all the advertised features are either bullcrap or have been solved in a proper way a long time ago.
Admin
How deep you fell, copying content from somebody else's blog. Shame, shame.
Admin
Hmmmm.
Are you suggesting that you want our pendulum to swing both ways?
Admin
As the sign above my monitor says...
"Tell me what you need and I will tell you how to get along with out it" No my quote but who ever said it is the smartest man alive.