Software Design: Tidy First?

Not A Copier

Kent Beck's avatar
Kent Beck
Nov 02, 2026

A highly skilled product manager, former colleague, told me they wanted to treat the genie like a copier. “Just tell me when you finish the 300 copies, as long as you don’t take a ridiculous amount of time.”

I get it. I’d like to say, “Write a high-performance, large-memory Smalltalk virtual machine with database semantics,” & have it come back when it’s…

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