Vviewpoints

DOI: 10.1145/2492007.2492019

Article development led by queue.acm.org

kode vicious
Cherry-Picking and
the scientific Method

Dear KV,

I have spent the past three weeks trying to cherry-pick changes out of one branch into another. When do I just give up and merge?

in the Pits

Dear Pits, I once rode home with a friend from a computer conference in Monterey. It just so happened that this friend is a huge fan of fresh cherries, and when he saw a small stand selling baskets of them he stopped to buy some. Another trait this friend pos-sesses is that he can’t ever pass up a good deal. So while haggling with the cherry seller, it became obvious that buying a whole flat of cherries would be a better deal than buying a single basket, even though that was all we really wanted. Not wanting to pass up a deal, however, my friend bought the entire flat and off we went— eating and talking. It took another 45 minutes to get home, and during that time we had eaten more than half the flat of cherries. I could not look at anything even remotely cherry-fla-vored for months; and today, when someone says “cherry-picking,” that does not conjure up happy images of privileged kids playing farmer on Saturday mornings along the California coast—I just feel ill.

All of which brings me to your let-
ter. It is always difficult to say when
someone else should “just give up and
do X” no matter what X is, but at some
point you know—deep down, some-
where in that place that makes you an
engineer—what started out as a quick
bit of cherry-picking has turned into
a horrific slog through the mud, and
nothing short of a John Deere tractor
is going to get you out of it. The happy
moments in the sunshine have ended,
it is raining, you are cold, and you just
want to go home. That is the time to
stop and try again.