YAGNI , JUDA or TALIA: Acronyms don't fist bump

YAGNI is a phrase that is heard every now and then in XP or Agile circles. I don't have any major philosophical objections to its employment in principle - where that employment is considered. But what I have experienced more than anything else, is its incautious, lazy and/or cavalier use. When YAGNI is used in such a manner, I think it more resembles JUDA (JUst Do Anything). And that is almost an onomatopoeia - think of the sound one makes when driving quickly over a 'sleeping policeman' (c.f. 'judder bar'/'speed bump'). That's how JUDA 'sounds' - hack, spike, hack, debt, hack...you get the picture.

Most of the time you should probably engage in TALIA (Think A Little In Advance). And the responsible YAGNI practitioners no doubt do - but as with most ideas, naive application leads to flawed conclusions.

I like acronyms.

State of contemporary web development

It can't carry on..AJAX, CSS, Javascript, XHTML, Silverlight - all to create the so called RIA - it must be reified soon - what a mess, multiple idioms, languages, approaches, skill levels. Would you commission an application written in Python, Ruby, C# and Smalltalk and not question your judgment for example?

A unified model must be impinging on the event horizon - we are not to be tied to dial up considerations forever I would imagine. The whole browser model needs a complete revamp - and not along the lines of 'plugins'. The current situation is but layers of awkardly integrated technologies to address an approach that was advanced in the '80's and '90's but is now just passe. If we assume a canonical GUI, then surely we can derive from that the most appropriate, unified language and approach?