Ryandor.com

Well, I believe it has a lot to do with the purpose and enviroment you are coding in.
As a hobby, no, I am not for a large design phase, I believe I have enough experience to do it in my head. If I have to deal with others, then of course that starts to break down.

Now, in a work environment, I really do enjoy the design and requirement phase far greater then the programming aspect. For I understand how signficant it is that I get that correct, or there will be signficant rework down the road, which may be unacceptable. But then I work in a non game environemnt, where we dont get to decide if it is "good enough". We have a set of top level requirements, that can result in hundreds of millions of dollars lost if not meet.

So I really think it depends greatly on when/what/why you are programming at that instance.

Do you think the (fun) design phase makes the programming part less entertaining (because most of the big problems are solved)? That is kind of what I was getting at...

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Nope, strictly in the fact, the system is far to complex to do otherwise. Plenty of challenges left, just now managable.

Again, my experience may not be applicable. I do not deal with Game/.com type codings.

More missle control, ground stations, fire feedback systems, etc. From a design/coding aspect, the issues are the same (and potential payoff from it). So I think the "fun" is applicable. But, it also means the environment itself is perhaps a tad more disciplined, and thus, isn't an issue of taking away the fun.

Again, for hobbies, I think one should just do what wants. If that is to design and get structure, great. If not, great. Enjoy the moment.

Well what Syd is saying is "there is never enough time to do things right in the first place, but there is always plenty of time to do it again"
I see it day in and day out as a consultant and to be honest I am sick and tired of cleaning up other peoples messes because they couldn't spend a few minutes to plan something out before they started working on it. Clients constantly want to know why they have to spend so much on their networks after they have already been deployed, when it is because everyone is in a rush to do something, but noone knows beforehand what it is they are supposed to be doing.

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I agree that big, complicated projects need a lot of pre-planning to make its lifecycle efficient enough. I also think that if a project is that complex, a lot of pre-planning in one form or another happens anyway, hobby or otherwise. I also think there is a point where it goes too far, and I think the things they teach you in books and in school take it too far.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Exactly. Bad for money, good for consumer and programmer.

Tabula Rasa (made by Lord British himself), for example, went through three or four years of development before being nearly completely scrapped and started over. It was supposed to be released a year ago, but it will not be released for another year. I admire that.

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Blog: http://www.sydius.org
Web: http://www.sydius.net

Just to check this with you all...

I don't see the problem with design taking the soul out of a program. IF it does, it means that once stage one is left, noone ever dares to go back to it. Not because design takes the soul out in itself.

Design establishes a timeline, that timeline is usualy changed to the deadline. That leaves no room for redesign.

The guy starting over after 3 years into the project probably had a real sollid design, only found out that it lacked to bring what he had in mind, and thus, went back to the drawing board to re-design.

Offcourse it would be dumb to design a program that stores the number of times you hit the 'enter' key on a give day... but if you where going to record the keypresses / user / day and probably want an analisys of it you will have to plan it to get it right the first time. Besides, noone said you can't prototype during design, to get comfertable with it.


After that, I personaly take great pride in being able to forsee the problems, and always seem to have missed a few to break my head anyways

Does this word what we are all saying more or less ? (checking since I used to get crap software, till I started planning in a way that works for me (not even following standards yet))

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Greetz
Planet_Jeroen