Building software tools

By -
How much time one should spend building the software the customers want, versus how much time one should spend building tools to better enable one to build the software the customers want, is simply a special case of how "round-about" one should make any production process.

My friend Howard Baetjer noted this many years ago, but it seems it is still not widely recognized in the software industry.

Comments

  1. Ken B11:47 PM

    IMO there are too many "frameworks" and meta tools. I cite as evidence the continual emergence of new ones. The toaster you use is essentially unchanged from the 1920s.
    I have seen projects go years long and almost 200m dollars over budget because of the insistence of using such a framework.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah12:29 AM

      Well, we certainly need a balance! But remember C is a "meta tool" over assembler: we also don't want to forego all such tools!

      Delete
    2. gcallah12:34 AM

      Also, that toaster is certainly not *produced* using the same tools as in 1920! And:

      "I cite as evidence the continual emergence of new ones."

      Would you say the continual emergence of new factory production techniques means there are too many factory production techniques?

      Delete
    3. Ken B9:17 AM

      When they are produced and adopted faster than the training time required to master them, yes. C was a commonly shared tool. So was Java or XML.So is now Hadoop. But within say the Java ecosystem there is a huge proliferation of tools that I can with confidence my fortune 10 employer would have been better off without. Cannot hire people, constant fixes and versions, incompatibilities between them, etc.

      Delete
    4. gcallah7:54 PM

      Yes: for sure this can go overboard!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more