Monday, September 16, 2013

Looking for "the right" answer

Good programmers will try to come up with several designs to address a task before settling on one approach.

This is a great point:

By the time the average person finishes college he or she will have taken over 2,600 tests, quizzes and exams. The 'right answer' approach becomes deeply ingrained in our thinking. This may be fine for some mathematical problems, where there is in fact only one right answer. The difficulty is that most of life isn't that way. Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers - all depending on what you are looking for. But when we think that there is only one right answer, we'll stop looking as soon as we find one.
-Roger von Oech, "A Whack On the Side Of The Head"

I try to teach my daughters to always consider more than one answer for most of life's problems. 

I find the trick is trying to come up with at least three possible answers.  Once I get best the obvious one or two normally I'll come up with several more.

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