March 2012
Beginner
84 pages
2h 12m
English
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 4. Change
Now that we understand the importance of the future, and that there are some things we don’t and can’t know about it, what can we know about it?
Well, one thing you can be sure of is that as time goes on, the environment around your software is going to change. Nothing stays the same forever. This means that your software will have to change in order to adapt to the environment around it.
This gives us the Law of Change:
The longer your program exists, the more probable it is that any piece of it will have to change.
As you go into an infinite future, you start tending toward a 100% probability that every single piece of your program will have to change. In the next five minutes, probably no part of your program will have to change. In the next 10 days, a small piece of it might. In the next 20 years, probably a majority of it (if not all of it) will have to change.
It’s hard to predict exactly what will change, and why. Maybe you wrote a program for 4-wheeled cars, but in the future everybody will drive 18-wheel trucks. Maybe you wrote a program for high school students, but high school education will get so bad that the students can’t understand it anymore.
The point is, you don’t have to try to predict what will change; you just need to know that things will change. Write your software so that it’s as flexible as reasonably possible, and you’ll be able to adapt to whatever future changes do come along.
Change in a Real-World Program
Let’s look at some data on how a ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.