3 ms·

Is this not simply because software is no longer art, but commerce? If you're making something for someone else, your soul isn't in it. So who cares?

by mvkel 3y ago

diatone 3y ago
I’m not sure you can characterise all software with such a sweeping generalisation. There are plenty of use cases outside commerce - outside optimising distribution and trade of goods and services - which software contributes to immensely. Also, maybe there’s an ironic counterfactual in payment and financial reporting networks, like Visa and Peppol. Peppol is not for profit, and Visa infamously facilitates five-way transactions with a huge degree of backwards compatibility. As an aside, I wonder what code quality means to the author of TFA, and what craftsmanship looks like. Would be fantastic to get clear examples of this from the history of the industry.
- samarthr1 3y ago
  Who are the 5 parties in the transaction though? I can only think of 4 (acquiring bank, user bank, user, merchant), who is the 5th party?
082349872349872 3y ago
It was commerce in the old (late 20th century) days too, but releasing on tape/disk had its advantages: We shipped every year, or maybe every 6 months. What this meant in practice is that every team got their features to "shoddy" state, but one team would always take much longer to get there than the others, and because we were in a "feature freeze" near ship dates, the teams who were waiting for integration could use that time to clean up their features, applying craftsmanship to make things "shipshape"; products could ship with one or two wobbly new features, and most of them pretty solid. Now, with internet updates, as soon as a team gets to "shoddy", the feature ships; no one polishes; and all new features tend towards wobbly. (for the business this is an advantage, as features are stabilised only in response to demonstrated customer demand, but I think the enforced opportunities for cleanup on the old schedule, however disadvantageous for the business, were advantageous for engineering, as well as those customers who hadn't explicitly signed up for the beta program)
- CM30 3y ago
  On the other hand, that also meant that if the team/company didn't give a toss about the quality they'd release the product unfinished, and there'd be no way to improve it even if someone wanted to. So while in some cases you'd have time to polish things up, in a lot of cases you still had the "eh, it's good enough, ship it" attitude without the benefit of being able to fix anything later.
pjc50 3y ago
Craftsmanship in the old sense, such as carpentry, was also usually commercial. Perhaps the word you're looking for is "alienation", in the M sense; you don't have a personal relationship with the customer/user.
- euroderf 3y ago
  Imperfect carpentry is easily reproducible in the sense that when you spot a flaw, it's trivial to point it out to others. This motivates the maker. Imperfect software is different. Your use case is (probably) not my use case so why would I get upset about the flaws that affect your use case ? Does this make me alienated from the user base as a whole ? Quite possibly.

Is this not simply because software is no longer art, but commerce? If you're making something for someone else, your soul isn't in it. So who cares?

by mvkel 3y ago

Is this not simply because software is no longer art, but commerce? If you're making something for someone else, your soul isn't in it. So who cares?

diatone 3y ago

I’m not sure you can characterise all software with such a sweeping generalisation. There are plenty of use cases outside commerce - outside optimising distribution and trade of goods and services - which software contributes to immensely. Also, maybe there’s an ironic counterfactual in payment and financial reporting networks, like Visa and Peppol. Peppol is not for profit, and Visa infamously facilitates five-way transactions with a huge degree of backwards compatibility. As an aside, I wonder what code quality means to the author of TFA, and what craftsmanship looks like. Would be fantastic to get clear examples of this from the history of the industry.

samarthr1 3y ago
Who are the 5 parties in the transaction though? I can only think of 4 (acquiring bank, user bank, user, merchant), who is the 5th party?

082349872349872 3y ago

It was commerce in the old (late 20th century) days too, but releasing on tape/disk had its advantages: We shipped every year, or maybe every 6 months. What this meant in practice is that every team got their features to "shoddy" state, but one team would always take much longer to get there than the others, and because we were in a "feature freeze" near ship dates, the teams who were waiting for integration could use that time to clean up their features, applying craftsmanship to make things "shipshape"; products could ship with one or two wobbly new features, and most of them pretty solid. Now, with internet updates, as soon as a team gets to "shoddy", the feature ships; no one polishes; and all new features tend towards wobbly. (for the business this is an advantage, as features are stabilised only in response to demonstrated customer demand, but I think the enforced opportunities for cleanup on the old schedule, however disadvantageous for the business, were advantageous for engineering, as well as those customers who hadn't explicitly signed up for the beta program)

CM30 3y ago
On the other hand, that also meant that if the team/company didn't give a toss about the quality they'd release the product unfinished, and there'd be no way to improve it even if someone wanted to. So while in some cases you'd have time to polish things up, in a lot of cases you still had the "eh, it's good enough, ship it" attitude without the benefit of being able to fix anything later.

pjc50 3y ago

Craftsmanship in the old sense, such as carpentry, was also usually commercial. Perhaps the word you're looking for is "alienation", in the M sense; you don't have a personal relationship with the customer/user.

euroderf 3y ago
Imperfect carpentry is easily reproducible in the sense that when you spot a flaw, it's trivial to point it out to others. This motivates the maker. Imperfect software is different. Your use case is (probably) not my use case so why would I get upset about the flaws that affect your use case ? Does this make me alienated from the user base as a whole ? Quite possibly.