[HN Gopher] Telescope Rule (2008)
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       Telescope Rule (2008)
        
       Author : melling
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2022-11-05 11:54 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (wiki.c2.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (wiki.c2.com)
        
       | oftenwrong wrote:
       | This seems related to the Fred Brooks advice of "plan to throw
       | one away", (also on the same wiki):
       | 
       | https://wiki.c2.com/?PlanToThrowOneAway
        
         | User23 wrote:
         | That wiki is the original wiki.
        
       | chantepierre wrote:
       | This is only tangential to the point raised by the article, but I
       | encourage anyone interested to try to make and measure a mirror,
       | it's a really rewarding process to take a round slab of glass to
       | an almost perfect parabolic surface (or at least within
       | tolerance). Nowadays, most amateurs also use interferometry which
       | could be appealing to HN crowd too.
       | 
       | I haven't followed this rule, starting small and easy, and my
       | first mirror took me 19 months. The second of similar difficulty
       | took about 2 months. Looking back, I find it strange to have
       | taken such a difficult first one, because I do start small and
       | build upon small steps in software.
        
         | Wistar wrote:
         | When I was very young, my father ground a 6" mirror with a 48"
         | focal length. I vaguely remember him walking around a table for
         | hours every night for weeks. The first mirror was a failure and
         | he had to start again. The finished telescope was--and is still
         | --a marvel although the mirror now needs to be re-silvered.
         | Alas, the light pollution in my area cannot be so easily
         | remedied.
        
       | blame-troi wrote:
       | True, but very few people seem to want to start small and build
       | skills. Wax on, wax off even.
       | 
       | Also, Brooks reminds us to plan to throw one away since you will
       | anyway.
        
       | carapace wrote:
       | If you want to write a compiler it's faster to learn Prolog then
       | write a compiler in Prolog than to write it in some other
       | [imperative] language you already know.
       | 
       | (Prolog is so much more "compiler-shaped" than imperative
       | languages and so simple itself that it's much easier to use it to
       | write compilers. In fact the last chapter of "Art of Prolog" is
       | about writing compilers.)
        
         | pjc50 wrote:
         | No.
         | 
         | (This is a joke about prolog error handling)
        
       | twawaaay wrote:
       | The same applies to most projects.
       | 
       | When I started in IT I would frequently run projects over my head
       | and then have to do a lot of backtracking wasting time.
       | 
       | Now, whenever I need to do something I don't know exactly how to,
       | I first run a bunch of test projects to learn the ropes on small
       | and manageable examples and only then attempt the large project.
       | 
       | I like to think that in almost all cases doing the small example
       | projects and the project take less time than if I started with
       | the large project right away. The only complaint is that managers
       | do not always see it this way and they want to see constant
       | progress.
        
       | michaelcampbell wrote:
       | Coincidentally I watched a discussion yesterday where the
       | assertion was made that complex systems cannot be written from
       | scratch (and hope to work); the ones that work today always
       | started from simpler systems.
        
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       (page generated 2022-11-05 23:01 UTC)