[Python-Dev] YAGNI (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Fri, 22 Mar 2002 16:28:25 -0500

Tim> Heck, if Unix dweebs had applied YAGNI, ls wouldn't have 51 useless Tim> options .

I believe the first couple Unix programmers did, though I doubt they thought of it in precisely that acronym. It was the masses that followed (probably influenced by some expatriate VMS programmers) who got carried away with adding thirty-leven options to every little filter. Skip

I remember that way back at CWI we called "the BSD disease" -- after our sysadmin had installed 4.0 BSD on our VAX, we were appalled by the code size growth of most common utilities.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)