alt Hacker News> So often times he would sit down with these accounting folks and go through lots of example transactions he came up with, and from there he essentially built up the requirements spec.
Right, so the spec is derived from examples, an interactive process that doesn’t require a programmer.
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dapperdrake • today at 4:37 PM
Talking to CPAs never gets you to Pacioli groups.
Talking to engineers and mathematicians gets you there.
skydhash • today at 1:26 PM
The programmer skill is how to abstract the specs from all the examples. And then to formalize it. Actual coding is merely translation. And only beginners tend to focus on that.
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Interpolating between the examples still requires understanding of the domain for the interpolation to be a sensible one. And it’s an iterative feedback process: thinking about possible interpolations leads you to cases that need clarifications from the domain experts. The domain experts won’t come up with all relevant examples by themselves, and they typically aren’t as good at thinking about interpolations like a developer who is trained to always consider all possible cases; they don’t think in terms of models the way a developer does.