To “celebrate” the arrival of CU and the lack of alternatives:
Excerpts from : http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/software-development-cancer.html
The analogy for software development is, they will convince you that a bed is better than a chair, and how it is easier for the code people to build and support a chair. That does not fly.
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In the end, we need to go to basic needs. And then, realize how everything is very simple. Why did smartphones succeed? Because they allowed a common person to do the same things they did on the PC cheaper and faster.
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And when you look at the world of technology through these lenses, you realize that software is irrelevant. Linux desktop is meaningless but Android is the king of the mobile. Microsoft rules the desktop and yet it struggles on the phone. So it’s not software. It’s the usage model. It’s what sort of basic needs they can satisfy.
So if you ever wonder why software developers should not be allowed to do anything more than just write code, look at successful products and try to figure out what the common denominator is in terms of underlying code. There isn’t any. Software is entirely replaceable, and must be completely transparent.
That’s your one measurement of success of good code. Take any product, say a Linux desktop. Then take one from a year ago. Can you still do the same things and workloads, or do you need to ask yourselves things like which distro, version, kernel, environment, library, or such? No, since you cannot decouple code from the usage model, you know it’s pointless and it needs to be deleted. This is true for pretty much any major product and framework that’s come out in Linux in the past five years.
It’s not about the age of the software and how suitable it is to the modern era, either. Most of the critical stuff runs on operating systems designed decades ago still being written in programming languages from the 70s.
A non-insignificant portion of my precious time is spent fretting, wondering when my browser, office suite, desktop environment, or even the operating system itself will suddenly stop working, because some software developer decided they are bored.
