Thursday, August 5, 2010

Why is Knitting Like Software Engineering?

On a quick side note:  I (and my computer) managed to survive a second try at yoga.

Now on to why you started reading this post in the first place.  You were just trying to know how I was going to relate those two topics!  These topics may seem to be unrelated but I have come up with a quick little explanation.

During software engineering process you often toss out more code than you finally use in the end.  The tossing out can be for various reasons:  found a better way, changed the design of other components, not needing the component, redesign, it only was needed once and was really short, combining multiple similar components, etc.  I think I remember something about tossing out 70% of the overall code written for a project.  Anyway, throwing away and starting over is often a requirement or a good thing.

Knitting has frogging.  (No I am not making that term up my non-knitting friends.  Need proof:  read this).  Frogging involves completely starting over or preparing the yarn for a new project.  Like with software engineering, frogging happens for a bunch of reasons:  mistakes, dropped stitches, deciding that the project does not work with the yarn/needle size, you just don't like the project, need to make the item bigger or smaller, etc.

Summary:  Both are hard to do, but it is often for the best.

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