Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/2492007.2492019
Article development led by
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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.