- From: Joseph Reagle <reagle@mit.edu>
- Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 13:59:04 -0400
- To: rss-dev@yahoogroups.com, "Danny Ayers" <danny666@virgilio.it>, "e_vitiello_jr" <yahoo@perceive.net>
On Wednesday 18 September 2002 12:34 pm, Danny Ayers wrote: > ps. what does 'amortized' mean? Updated! http://goatee.net/2002/09#_18we °02.09.18.we | design is like a mortgage Continuing to extend the metaphor of Balancing and Swinging the Seesaw to home mortgages: > ps. what does 'amortized' mean? "To write off an expenditure for (office equipment, for example) by prorating over a certain period." When I think about an application, there's a certain expenditure one must make with respect to design. I can do it quick and cheap now and incur the most of the cost later (with compounded interest) when confronted with issues of scalability, interop, extensibility, etc. Or I can spend a a lot up front modeling, and designing for flexibility and extensibility. Think of purchasing a cool old fixer-upper home, you can select from a couple of properties on the market. First, you want something with the soundest footing at the most inexpensive price. Also, you'd probably need a mortgage. The smaller the down payment, the larger the total cost. So ideally, you want your down payment to be as large as possible. But, your initial cash reserve is limited, so you put down your limited down payment and then can at least move in and start fixing it up and increasing your value. Same thing with applications! In the end you want to move in and improve where most needed, but you also want something with a sound architectural footing. That's a balancing act -- though sometimes there's design principles and technologies that lessen immediate and future costs. RDF has a great architectural footing -- those who don't like it are doomed to reinvent it poorly -- but an immediate/localized cost of comprehension. Additionally, the order semantic of RSS nces sequences unfortunately imposes such a cost without much benefit. (It's a sequence, but you don't know what sort of sequence: a mandatory RDF artifact for an optional feature doesn't make much sense to me.) Plus, in the great marketplace of ideas, maybe this design/technology wasn't going to go anywhere anyway. So spending too much time on it at the start might be an unwise investment. (Torvalds' theory on design and project management is useful reading on this note.)
Received on Wednesday, 18 September 2002 13:59:36 UTC