Comment by mojombo
16 years ago
The benefit of doing your design in a Readme over doing it on a whiteboard or elsewhere is that it becomes a nice piece of documentation sitting right there in the root of the project. The first place you look for an explanation of what the project does and how to use it. Everybody wins!
Oh, I don't disagree with that part at all, I just think that your aside about it encouraging just the right amount of design upfront deserves more thought.
I tend to do design brainstorming on scratch paper, Emacs scratch buffers, and in Prolog, but I'm already convinced about the merits of having a good README, and would write one regardless. (Just like I write tests anyway, whether or not I do them upfront.)
all true, but the fact that the advice boils down to "store your spec where people can easily read it later" must qualify for a Captain Obvious award.