Subject: [DGD] yet another object manager question.. or two
From: DGD Mailing List (Stephen Schmidt)
Date: Fri Apr 9 14:02:01 2004

On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Michael McKiel wrote:
> I believe hardcoded defaults, like hardcoding kernel dependencies et al was
> mentioned in the archives, is there any reasonable reason not to do this?
> these are things that should likely never change.

If you're planning to distribute your code to others, then it's
very hard to know what some idiot who downloads your lib might
change :)

Hardcoding things makes them brittle. Brittle is not necessarily
bad, as long as you can be certain changes will never be made
that break the brittleness. As long as you are the only user
of your code, you can be reasonably sure about that. Or at worst,
you can hope that you'll remember to change the hard coding,
perhaps only after the first crash.

However, if you are going to let someone else use your code,
either because you're distributing it, or because someday your
interests are going to change and someone else is going to take
over as head wizard at the mud - then making things robust can
make life easier for the person who comes after you. Or, it can
make life easier on you if, like me, you tend to forget what
you hardcoded in the past. That's the main reason to not hardcode
things. It also makes it easier for you to go back and do changes
at fundamental levels without having to rewrite all your hardcodes.

Steve