On Feb 6, 2006, at 10:34 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
At 12:25 AM -0500 02/03/2006, phoenix wrote:
Lazy programmers and feature creep. Having worked for a software
development firm, I can tell you these are the two biggest reasons
we have
such Big Fat Hairy programs out there today.
I have to disagree.
It's not laziness - it's incompetence.
Back in the day, programmers were Engineers - they actually had 4
or 6 year Computer Science educations from college. They actually
knew how to design or select efficient algorithms.
And back in the day, 99% of them never had to deal with a GUI, or
were even thinking of doing something on the order of Photoshop.
"Efficient algorithms" are SUCH a tiny part of programming todays
applications that it's not even funny.
Blaming it on incompetence is merely the lazy way out...software is a
LOT more complex today than it was "in the day"...if you don't think
so, feel free to go back to using an Apple II for your day to day
use, and see how far you get.
Me, I'm glad we have the BFH programs of today...they let me do *my*
job more efficiently, which is vastly more important than letting my
computer do it's job more efficiently. Buying more hardware to do
that is not even a problem. Hardware is cheap and amortizable. Human
capital isn't.
This isn't an excuse for sloppy programming or feature creep, both of
which are huge factors in why Office is now 300MB instead of 300KB,
but there's also the fact that 300MB today costs a fraction of what
300K did then.
They concentrated on efficiency then, because they had to.
ALL engineering is constrained by one simple adage: "Fast, Cheap,
Good: choose any two" with the Jobs corollary "Real Programmers Ship".
--
Bruce Johnson
This is the sig who says 'Ni!'
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