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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> Identification of critical API calls and respective timings would be integral to continue building the GUI elements. But we all know how waterfall is poo-pooed these days.

If you've worked out which API calls are happening and how often, you've already written most of the application. It's just that it might be on paper or in pseudocode.

Waterfall was abandoned because getting to that level of detail takes far too long for management to accept and it's easier - sometimes orders of magnitude faster - to write the thing as actual code, try it, and then see what needs improving. And see what was wrong with the requirements.

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That presupposes that you can start with a big pile of bad APIs and somehow incrementally approach something worth having. That's not consistent with my experience. In my experience the innermost APIs, the ones that get written down first, are effectively cast in stone and dictate the quality of the whole product, forever. The first draft of a system is the one that should have all its APIs worked out with a pencil before any code is written. You get these accidental complexity explosions precisely because someone thought it was easy and obvious to write a function returning std::vector<string> (or whatever) and didn't consider from the caller's point of view that making the function take an output iterator might be less complex.

You are right. It is typically more effective to write one implementation as a hacky prototype, play with it a bit, throw it away, and then rewrite a production implementation from scratch, so that the mistakes of a design made by someone inexperienced don’t get baked in forever.

Unfortunately there are cultural/psychological factors which often preclude or discourage this method, even if it would save time and produce better code in the medium term than either exhaustive planning up front uninformed by practice OR just iterating the initial broken version to continually meet new requirements.

Lol, ninjaed, see above.

I've been taught waterfall a couple of years ago. We were supposed to do our project using waterfall (but at least with weekly meetings with the "customers").

My suggestion of building a first test version to, amongst other things, at least get our feets wet with the programming language (which most of us had hardly any experience with), then throw it completely away and restart "from scratch" (but with a better idea as of what we were supposed to do) was rejected.

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