Horse By Committee

A camel is a horse designed by committee -- Anon

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I always found this slogan to be unfair. A committee could never design such a clever thing as a camel. --MarkoSchulz

I'd agree, I'd sure like to see the horse that is as well adapted to a desert environment as a camel.

Folks, a horse designed by a committee is a dog.

Isn't evolution essentially design by committee?

Definitely not. Evolution checks its designs with reality.

In fact, evolution makes constant use of the XP principles of frequent releases, unit tests AND functional tests. evolution only applies one test to every organism, did_it_breed_successfully().

So would evolution be a committee designed by reality?

Perhaps, but we hate the implication that there are committees that are not evil (or worse, that evolution is evil).

But the fact remains that code edited by many people or by one person over a longer period of time gets humpy. --Stephen Muires

The Independent Multi-Function Large Mammal Standards Committee recently announced the impending availability of the Horse 1.0 specification for public comment; a reference implementation should be available in the near future (12-18 months).

The intermediate draft of the IMFLMSC standard is available in HTML format at http://www.imflmsc.org/standards/horse10/RFC87236.html.

This is all beside the point. Microsoft DotHorse? is almost here, and it will make these slow, bloated, late "standards" look... um... Well, it has a lot of innovation in it, like requiring Windows 2001 to run.

Not to be outdone, Sun Microsystems has announced Java Horse, which implements the August 12th (2000) draft of the IMFLMSC standard as interpreted by several important people at Sun. In a continued move towards openness, Sun promised regular press releases under the "community press release" program.

Hey, um, Elliotte Rusty Harold just released his "Horse 1.0 Bible, Gold Edition" ISBN 0-7645-4820-0 through Hungry Minds Press (http://www.hungryminds.com). It's much better than the original book. It covers all the stuff from the 2nd Edition of the IMFLMSC spec.

I hear that in late 2002 Fidelity began running an ad seeking people with five years experience in Horse 1.1.

"A committee is a cul-de-sac into which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled."

CategoryHumor