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I wanted to say that for 10 billion USD I could also deliver you miracles in the "cloud software engineering world", but the truth is probably not. If a pure s

I wanted to say that for 10 billion USD I could also deliver you miracles in the "cloud software engineering world", but the truth is probably not. If a pure software project would get that kind of money people probably would feature bloat to infinity. The JWST during its design phase were under very strict limiting factors. Volume limit, mass limit, power limit, etc. Compared that with any software project where obviously there are limits but they are much more malleable. You can argue that we need to provision 20% more servers to achieve our goal, but you cannot argue that we need to stretch the Ariane 5 by 20%. (Well you can argue, but the rocket is not going to get stretched.) So all in all, it seems I'm agreeing with you. But I don't think it's about the quality or grownupness of the participants, but more about the shape of the problem.

dekhn 5y ago
The way I think about it is the standard was set by the Apollo engineers. I think many of us are familiar with the MCP and all the other cool details about the hardware of the mission, but the reality is: everybody who worked on that had previously done something similar, but for the military, and they took every bit of hard-won experience from the previous projects (ballistic missles guidance, military radar, data coding, etc) and applied it in a totally unceremonious and highly effective way. I think the modern computing world instead is not grownup, but rather CADT (cascade attention deficit teenagers). A constant developing of new solutions that copy previous ones, but are typically worse, or have the same problems as the previous ones. This seems endemic in the industry, albiet with exceptions.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Quite. It will be a long time before the software industry will grow up at the present rate.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    There are plenty of subsets of the software industry that are grown-up. Anybody who wants to learn more should read the RISKS mailing list and its archives. It's remarkably hard to produce reliable software but a number of groups around the world can do it. Examples I can think of: the teams that built the series of ESS for AT&T. The folks who built Erlang (telecom reliability is a common theme here, being one of the other technical areas where software and hardware engineering excellence greatly exceeds that which we see from typical groups today). Even Qt, although the quality of their code and its adherence to the principles that make Qt great is variable, I'd say is a good example of a system built by grown-ups. BTW, when i say "grown-up", I don't really mean anything directly related to age, although age and experience are the best proxies for grown-up. Grown up is really a way of saying: working with more weight on wisdom as raw intelligence (Ghemawat's law), respecting experience even if it's not obvious why you should, (Chesterton's Fence), using statistical testing techniques effectively for quality control (Shewhart), practicing discipline to ensure long-term compatibility and not burning your dependents (jwz's law of CADT). I don't think there's a general term for acting with these principles, I just mentally associate them with being a grownup who has learned from experience.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      > Anybody who wants to learn more should read the RISKS mailing list and its archives. Yes, totally second that, that's the best school there is, seeing what goes wrong and what the consequences are. I probably spent weeks just reading and analyzing the various posts there. As for the part of the industry that isn't grown up: anything that can do OTA or automatic updates is likely to suffer from a rash of bugs and usability issues, which includes everything that's SAAS and almost all application software with the exception of some industrial stuff. There is far more low quality software than there is high quality software.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
redisman 5y ago
The bottom line is that the JWST is doing something incredibly novel. The price tag is kind of irrelevant.

dekhn 5y ago

The way I think about it is the standard was set by the Apollo engineers. I think many of us are familiar with the MCP and all the other cool details about the hardware of the mission, but the reality is: everybody who worked on that had previously done something similar, but for the military, and they took every bit of hard-won experience from the previous projects (ballistic missles guidance, military radar, data coding, etc) and applied it in a totally unceremonious and highly effective way. I think the modern computing world instead is not grownup, but rather CADT (cascade attention deficit teenagers). A constant developing of new solutions that copy previous ones, but are typically worse, or have the same problems as the previous ones. This seems endemic in the industry, albiet with exceptions.

jacquesm 5y ago
Quite. It will be a long time before the software industry will grow up at the present rate.
- dekhn 5y ago
  There are plenty of subsets of the software industry that are grown-up. Anybody who wants to learn more should read the RISKS mailing list and its archives. It's remarkably hard to produce reliable software but a number of groups around the world can do it. Examples I can think of: the teams that built the series of ESS for AT&T. The folks who built Erlang (telecom reliability is a common theme here, being one of the other technical areas where software and hardware engineering excellence greatly exceeds that which we see from typical groups today). Even Qt, although the quality of their code and its adherence to the principles that make Qt great is variable, I'd say is a good example of a system built by grown-ups. BTW, when i say "grown-up", I don't really mean anything directly related to age, although age and experience are the best proxies for grown-up. Grown up is really a way of saying: working with more weight on wisdom as raw intelligence (Ghemawat's law), respecting experience even if it's not obvious why you should, (Chesterton's Fence), using statistical testing techniques effectively for quality control (Shewhart), practicing discipline to ensure long-term compatibility and not burning your dependents (jwz's law of CADT). I don't think there's a general term for acting with these principles, I just mentally associate them with being a grownup who has learned from experience.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    > Anybody who wants to learn more should read the RISKS mailing list and its archives. Yes, totally second that, that's the best school there is, seeing what goes wrong and what the consequences are. I probably spent weeks just reading and analyzing the various posts there. As for the part of the industry that isn't grown up: anything that can do OTA or automatic updates is likely to suffer from a rash of bugs and usability issues, which includes everything that's SAAS and almost all application software with the exception of some industrial stuff. There is far more low quality software than there is high quality software.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

redisman 5y ago

The bottom line is that the JWST is doing something incredibly novel. The price tag is kind of irrelevant.