Paul McNett wrote:

> Ed Leafe wrote:

>> I've worked for many clients who made claims like "we will never need more than one phone number per customer" or "part numbers will never be more than 4 places" or "640K will be enough for anyone". (OK, that last one wasn't from one of my clients!).

>

> It's become a running joke between myself and my principle contact at my main client.

> They keep constraining what I do based on what they think will get the job done

> faster (more cheaply). ...

>

> I get the job done pretty quickly and it works well. We maintain it and enhance it

> over the years as needs change and business rules flex with the times. ...

>

> There are many such examples in my client relationships. For this one client, I make

> a point of finding the original email where she says "we'll never need this" and

> replying to it with a wink. But she still never learns. ;)

In fairness to such clients (and to ourselves as well), the delicate balance between

efficiency/simplicity/cost-effectiveness and extensibility/flexibility/good architecture

is one of the most difficult aspects of software development, and one of the reasons

experienced developers are worth their salt -- that indefinable thing called

"engineering judgment" has some subtle aspects and comes through hard

lessons. It's also one of the reasons why reading/maintaining code is so much

harder than developing/writing it in the first place -- which accentuates

one of the strengths of Python: *clarity* (of course it's possible to write

obfuscated, spaghetti Python code, but Python makes clarity relatively easy).

Happy New Year, Paul and Ed -- hope to see you at PyCon! :)

Steve

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