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What do you mean by barely working (and as a corollary, does it even make sense for it to do more than that)? The spectrum of correctness seems quite limited; y
by faitswulff 8y ago
What do you mean by barely working (and as a corollary, does it even make sense for it to do more than that)? The spectrum of correctness seems quite limited; you said it yourself, software starts out not working, and then when it's correct, it works. It seems pretty binary to me. Do you mean that the software is brittle, doesn't handle edge cases, has bugs, etc? It seems to me that once software is correct, there's not much more to do in terms of working.
- beat 8y agoYes, I mean brittleness, inability to handle edge cases, etc. Oftentimes, this means that it's boxed-in and can't grow in certain necessary directions without major rework. For example, take a deployment configuration where the target environments are hardcoded, with duplicate-minus-variation configuration files. Works fine, for the existing environments. But it can't handle a new one, not without duplicating again. Correcting this means going to some sort of a template configuration with parameters in a data store. Bit rot is part of this. Works fine in Windows 10, but it'll fail come Windows 11, etc. And yes, part of what I'm arguing is that it doesn't even make sense for software to be better than barely working. I've hit a point where I think code that works too well is a project management smell.