5 ms·

“Bad code that ships is better than good code that doesn't” Maybe better for your bottom line (no criticism, we all have to eat), but not better for the world.

“Bad code that ships is better than good code that doesn't” Maybe better for your bottom line (no criticism, we all have to eat), but not better for the world. Look around at our software universe: bad code that shipped, everywhere. Bad code that ships gets us Windows.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
But good code that doesn't ship gets us nothing. Awful as it is (and especially as it was), Windows was good enough and cheap enough for a whole lot of people to be able to afford computers that they could use.
- thinkharderdev 6y ago
  This assumes that bad code is, at worst, worth nothing which isn't the case. Bad code that crashes a mission critical system is absolutely worse than nothing. Or to take your Windows example, I could argue that the problem with Windows was the opportunity cost. If Windows didn't take over the world maybe we would have more choices when it comes to desktop OSs
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    No. Bad code that crashes a mission critical system may in fact be worse less than nothing, but my argument doesn't assume that. It assumes that Windows, though bad code, was still worth more than nothing. What's more, it takes the massive success of Windows as market-based evidence that Windows was worth quite a bit more than nothing - or at least, computers running Windows were worth something. Opportunity cost isn't usually considered in terms of a market, it's considered for an organization. If Microsoft hadn't done Windows, could they have done something more successful with the resources? That's pretty hard to imagine. Certainly you can say that Windows was bad for (the rest of) the desktop OS market. But the fact is, no mind control rays were involved. Microsoft created an OS that unlocked enough functionality for the average user, for little enough cost, that Microsoft took over the world. (Yeah, I know, lock-in and monopoly shenanigans. It's true. But none of it would have mattered if the OS were not good enough to mostly work for most people.) I can't believe I'm being an apologist for Windows. Gack.
    - thinkharderdev 6y ago
      Yeah, fair enough. I guess at least from MSFTs perspective bad code was better than nothing.
jcelerier 6y ago
> Bad code that ships gets us Windows. as much as an enthusiast linux user I am, I'm pretty sure that the world would be a worse place without DOS & Windows
- ragnese 6y ago
  How so? I mean, obviously it's impossible to make a decent educated guess since basically the entirety of most peoples' interactions with computers stems from the near-monopoly Microsoft had on personal computing in the 90s. But I'm still curious to know what you predict would be different if MS didn't strike their deal with IBM.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    MS Window's presence in the market made PCs true commodities and drove down the price for home and office computers in a way none of their contemporary competitors would have achieved. Most of their competitors were tied to hardware, and received a lot of their revenue and profit from the combination of hardware and software sales. MS only needed to sell the software, and let HP, Dell, Gateway, and others compete on hardware prices. This probably put more computers out there (within that time span) than would have been achieved without them.
  - p_l 6y ago
    It's less about the deal, and more about MS following a pretty strict philosophy that if your software, the software you bought runs on OS version X, the only reason it may not run on version X+1 is a dumb bug in the software. Also they kept at "computers accessible to everyone", and as much as they fought competition, I have to admit they did it.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > How so? I mean, obviously it's impossible to make a decent educated guess since basically the entirety of most peoples' interactions with computers stems from the near-monopoly Microsoft had on personal computing in the 90s. But I'm still curious to know what you predict would be different if MS didn't strike their deal with IBM. I've occasionally seen speculation that in the absence of the de-facto DOS monoculture that deal created, CP/M may have been the most likely desktop platform winner, at least initially.
leafboi 6y ago
“Bad code that ships is better than good code that doesn't” When you work on code long enough two things will eventually happen: Shippable Bad code will eventually be unshippable. Unshippable Good code will eventually be shippable. Your quotation simplifies a concept by hiding the extra dimension of time. Bad or good, shippable code depends on a point in time.... It could be shippable now, or shippable in the future...
pc86 6y ago
Pretty terrible example. Bad code gets us the most used, most popular desktop (and maybe server, definitely server for certain industries) operating system in the world? Mac is great, I have one, but Apple made it's cash stores on the back of the iPhone, not MacOS.
- jheriko 6y ago
  IMO MacOS is not an example of good code, or good engineering. The engineering decisions made are often terrible, including recycling the legacy of NeXT for what I assume were ego-based reasons... Nothing in the history of Windows compares to that scale of bad.
  - pc86 6y ago
    I wasn't clear, I didn't mean to imply that MacOS is technically better than Windows, just that Windows is by far the most popular OS and was trying to cut off any rebuttal boiling down to "but I use a Mac."

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

But good code that doesn't ship gets us nothing. Awful as it is (and especially as it was), Windows was good enough and cheap enough for a whole lot of people to be able to afford computers that they could use.

thinkharderdev 6y ago
This assumes that bad code is, at worst, worth nothing which isn't the case. Bad code that crashes a mission critical system is absolutely worse than nothing. Or to take your Windows example, I could argue that the problem with Windows was the opportunity cost. If Windows didn't take over the world maybe we would have more choices when it comes to desktop OSs
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  No. Bad code that crashes a mission critical system may in fact be worse less than nothing, but my argument doesn't assume that. It assumes that Windows, though bad code, was still worth more than nothing. What's more, it takes the massive success of Windows as market-based evidence that Windows was worth quite a bit more than nothing - or at least, computers running Windows were worth something. Opportunity cost isn't usually considered in terms of a market, it's considered for an organization. If Microsoft hadn't done Windows, could they have done something more successful with the resources? That's pretty hard to imagine. Certainly you can say that Windows was bad for (the rest of) the desktop OS market. But the fact is, no mind control rays were involved. Microsoft created an OS that unlocked enough functionality for the average user, for little enough cost, that Microsoft took over the world. (Yeah, I know, lock-in and monopoly shenanigans. It's true. But none of it would have mattered if the OS were not good enough to mostly work for most people.) I can't believe I'm being an apologist for Windows. Gack.
  - thinkharderdev 6y ago
    Yeah, fair enough. I guess at least from MSFTs perspective bad code was better than nothing.

jcelerier 6y ago

> Bad code that ships gets us Windows. as much as an enthusiast linux user I am, I'm pretty sure that the world would be a worse place without DOS & Windows

ragnese 6y ago
How so? I mean, obviously it's impossible to make a decent educated guess since basically the entirety of most peoples' interactions with computers stems from the near-monopoly Microsoft had on personal computing in the 90s. But I'm still curious to know what you predict would be different if MS didn't strike their deal with IBM.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  MS Window's presence in the market made PCs true commodities and drove down the price for home and office computers in a way none of their contemporary competitors would have achieved. Most of their competitors were tied to hardware, and received a lot of their revenue and profit from the combination of hardware and software sales. MS only needed to sell the software, and let HP, Dell, Gateway, and others compete on hardware prices. This probably put more computers out there (within that time span) than would have been achieved without them.
- p_l 6y ago
  It's less about the deal, and more about MS following a pretty strict philosophy that if your software, the software you bought runs on OS version X, the only reason it may not run on version X+1 is a dumb bug in the software. Also they kept at "computers accessible to everyone", and as much as they fought competition, I have to admit they did it.
- webmaven 6y ago
  > How so? I mean, obviously it's impossible to make a decent educated guess since basically the entirety of most peoples' interactions with computers stems from the near-monopoly Microsoft had on personal computing in the 90s. But I'm still curious to know what you predict would be different if MS didn't strike their deal with IBM. I've occasionally seen speculation that in the absence of the de-facto DOS monoculture that deal created, CP/M may have been the most likely desktop platform winner, at least initially.

leafboi 6y ago

“Bad code that ships is better than good code that doesn't” When you work on code long enough two things will eventually happen: Shippable Bad code will eventually be unshippable. Unshippable Good code will eventually be shippable. Your quotation simplifies a concept by hiding the extra dimension of time. Bad or good, shippable code depends on a point in time.... It could be shippable now, or shippable in the future...

pc86 6y ago

Pretty terrible example. Bad code gets us the most used, most popular desktop (and maybe server, definitely server for certain industries) operating system in the world? Mac is great, I have one, but Apple made it's cash stores on the back of the iPhone, not MacOS.

jheriko 6y ago
IMO MacOS is not an example of good code, or good engineering. The engineering decisions made are often terrible, including recycling the legacy of NeXT for what I assume were ego-based reasons... Nothing in the history of Windows compares to that scale of bad.
- pc86 6y ago
  I wasn't clear, I didn't mean to imply that MacOS is technically better than Windows, just that Windows is by far the most popular OS and was trying to cut off any rebuttal boiling down to "but I use a Mac."