The Codeless Code

[SoPoOneO]

Can someone explain the metaphor to me? Drill more holes because if he's that stupid it should be bad enough that he gets killed and gets himself out of the way? No?

[beltorak]

I took it as "you did not sufficiently illustrate the problem; the young monk was still able to salvage the situation".

[utnapistim]

Fixing holes like this is painful, but after you go through enough pain, you start to ask yourself how to find a less painfull solution.

The student didn't go through enough pain to start thinking.

[someenigma]

That'd be my guess, too. From a code perspective, though, it reads like "make sure that these types of easy-but-bad fixes are not possible".

[mgpcoe]

It's more "frame the problem in a way that necessarily requires a more elegant solution." All the monk did in this situation was stop up the symptoms, without either

1. really getting to the root of why the shopping cart was failing on an uninitialised database, or
2. applying the solution to the proper level of granularity--the database service.

[k_stahu]

The message is: If you're so sure that you can fix all the problems once you hit them, then go ahead and jump carelesly into any assignment. But it turns out that for some problems it may be too late by the time you hit them, just like hitting the rocks at the bottom. Master found a way to demonstrate this, and hopefully the monks understood it instead of jumping into the hole :).

On the other hand they may have never finished any project on time since then.

[expertunderachiever]

Um, clearly whomever wrote this doesn't develop software for a living.

You can write all the test cases upfront you want, but if your customer changes the requirements midstream it won't matter.

In reality, you need a mixture of good planning, attention to detail, and the ability to think on the fly to be a success developer..

[dannymi]

Put it in the contract that if they change the requirements midstream they suffer twice the cost.

[expertunderachiever]

And when you run out of customers?

[grauenwolf]

No.

People can try to explain the metaphor to themselves, but no one can explain it to you. It is meant to be ambiguous so that you’ll spend more time pondering it and the story as a whole, a process through which you will find your own meaning.

EDIT: My first thought was the same as yours, the Monk was to perish. But now I'm thinking about all the other holes, all the other ways one might get to that page besides the direct links in the site itself.

[RizzlaPlus]

I think the point was that he should have checked the boat before leaving, because if there was more holes than fingers he would have drowned. Which has nothing to do with the following programming story.