Posted by Jerry Stuckle on 10/08/07 11:52

Ben C wrote:
> On 2007-10-07, SpaceGirl <nothespacegirlspam@subhuman.net> wrote:
>> Jerry Stuckle wrote:
> [...]
>>> There is a formal process to managing projects, just like there is for a
>>> lot of things. And it works. But when you've never used this process,
>>> you can come up with all kinds of rationalizations as to why it won't work.
>>>
>> This is all very nice, but what about RAD? Or Agile? And how does this
>> apply to small enclosed languages like AS3.
>
> "Agile" is a "methodology" or family of methodologies, distinguished
> mainly by being trendy. I suspect they would accuse Jerry Stuckle of
> being a old-fashioned "Waterfall".
>

Yep, and I'd love to see it applied successfully to a two or three year
project with > 100 programmers on it. It's new, and it's trendy. But I
haven't seen where it's "better" yet. It's simply a methodology which
skips the up front work. Well loved by programmers who don't like to
document. :-)

> The fact that the both sides of the argument are represented can be a
> good thing politically though.
>
> "RAD" just means using a visual IDE instead of a proper^H^H^H^H^H^H
> editor.
>

To some extent, yes. But in the better RAD products, you have a lot of
stuff behind them, also.

For instance, the old IBM VisualAge for C++ had a lot of classes behind
it for all kinds of things. You could build an entire application and
only have to write a very few lines of code. Not quite plug and play,
but close to it.

The down side if it was it was that the resulting application was very
bloated and slow.

They also had (still have?) a VisualAge for Java product which was
actually pretty decent. But they priced it too high for it to catch on.

> The choice of language, methodology, and programming environment are all
> independent. You can do up-front design and program in C, or
> just-in-time Agile design (or whatever they call it) and program in C++.
> You can use whatever programming environment you like for either (in
> general, although some languages are quite closely tied to a particular
> programming environment).

Within limits, very true. But some fit together better than others.

--
==================
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Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex@attglobal.net
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