On 9/17/11 9:53 AM, Peter Alexander wrote:
On 17/09/11 3:09 AM, Xavier wrote:
Peter Alexander wrote:
I recently stumbled across this (old) blog post:
http://prog21.dadgum.com/13.html
In summary, the author asks if you were offered $100,000,000 for some
big software project,
While this is a "silly little hypothetical thread" (and it is Friday
afterall so that probably explains the OP), I cannot fathom that amount
being spent on just software on one project (though I've worked on one
system, i.e., software + hardware, project worth 10's of millions). Maybe
someone here can? Examples please, or give the largest one you can think
of (it can be hypothetical). Remember, it's just software, not a system.
The number is unimportant. It's just a placeholder. Could just be $100k
if that makes it easier.
It's just a thought experiment: being honest, would you use D for a
large project with high stakes?
Well I did (which makes it less of a Gedankenexperiment). My doctorate
is in machine learning applied to NLP, and a lot of research in this
field consists of systems building. (It's quite surprising, really -
once you have the data, the paper can be written the night before the
submission.) The stakes were quite high to me personally - I had just
switched fields (and statistically most who do give up later on), the
field was new to me, I'd started a family, not to mention I was
incurring opportunity losses in income. Being unable to complete my
doctorate or spending much longer on it would have been quite a disaster.
Andrei
