How Shall We Define Design?

I love object-oriented design. It’s like open source software in general;
perfect strangers come up with ideas that can save me time and money and
then, out of the goodness of their hearts, go to a fair amount of trouble
to pass these ideas on. I benefit from their efforts every day.

However, you don’t have to go far to find competent, thoughtful,
well-intentioned folks who curse and spit when they say ‘design’. To these
folks OOD is anathema; they see it as useless excess that must be avoided
at all costs.

Two things are odd about this situation. First, while I’m certainly no
genius, neither am I a complete idiot. As a woman of a certain age I’ve
been writing code for an alarmingly long time. I have tons of experience
getting applications out the door and my experience is that OOD lowers
costs, increases output and keeps code fun.

Second, when I listen to the anti-design folks explain their
points-of-view, I agree with about 99.9% of what they have to say.