Tim Bray on code performance

Tim Bray is apparently doing some real development in C right now, and says something that is near and dear to the hearts of XP folks:

This work has reinforced my conviction that you never really understand the problem until you’ve written some of the code.

That is why agile methods are becoming so popular. Folks who spend months putting together giant design docs without trying anything in code will certainly need to anticipate many “change requests”, because they won’t truly understand the needs.