This is another brief, bad analogy (though I think I might leave it unexplained to start, for the hell of it). If you don’t ‘grok’ the NFL, this won’t necessarily be totally clear. Even if you do, this won’t necessarily be totally clear. But you knew that.
The goal of any professional football player is to win the Super Bowl (no, not that football, the World Cup is for soccer), and for various silly reasons, the careers of professional athletes are sometimes judged due to whether or not they have at some point won the championship of their sport (if you think about this, except for individual sports like tennis or golf, this is pretty stupid, but I digress).
When it comes to the National Football League, an interesting/time-wasting bar discussion concerns who the best QBs in the history of the league are.
Dan Marino was a stud college player who completely blew his senior year at Pitt along with Foge Fazio (not that I remain bitter about it), because of which he was drafted towards the end of the first round in 1982 or 1983 or whatever by the Miami Dolphins. In a long and illustrious career during which he set multiple all-time records, he played in one Super Bowl, and lost to the 49ers (they used to be good, did you know that? Yes, we had indoor plumbing then).
Jeff Hostetler was a relatively decent college player at West Virginia, decent enough to get drafted into the NFL and played for a few teams. One year, with the NY Giants, he became the starting QB when the real starter, Phil Simms, was injured late in the season, and ‘led’ the team to victory in the Super Bowl over the Buffalo Bills, because the Bills place kicker had the most famous missed field goal in the history of the league.
No one, except maybe his mom, would ever think of listing Jeff Hostetler as a great quarterback (and even his mom, if she has any sense, would agree). Everyone would list Dan Marino as one (he usually loses out to Joe Montana and/or John Elway as the greatest ever, precisely because he didn’t win the Super Bowl, but he’s in the conversation). If one was faced with the choice, no one in his right mind would choose Hostetler over Marino to be the QB of his team.
And yet the fact remains, Hostetler is a Super Bowl winning QB, but Dan Marino is not. And in case anyone else was wondering, yes, I could have used Trent Dilfer as the example.
And this is why I do not believe that Alt.NET always teaches the right way to design software, and in fact, sometimes teaches the wrong way.