3 ms·

Jottit may end up being the classic example of why striving for perfect code is a bad idea. Half a year on a textarea... I hope it turns out to be awesome.

• palish 19y ago
  There's a hidden advantage. When he's done, he's done. He doesn't need to spend any more time on it once it's basically perfect. But its function will last as long as there's a server to host it. So if his next project turns out to be that way, then ten projects thereafter, pretty soon he's made a suite of applications that a large number of people find useful.
  • edw519 19y ago
    I once did a post-mortem on 700 IT software requests over an 18 month period. I came to the conclusion that 95% of them were to change THAT WHICH SHOULD HAVE NEVER BEEN RELEASED. In other words, 10 programmers were kept busy in a $100 million company FIXING THEIR OWN BUGS. The business wasn't changing so much to require them; their own incomplete work made them necessary. Sure, you can work on perfect so hard that you never release anything. OTOH, there's a lot to be said for high quality work.
    • davidw 19y ago
      On the other hand, the history of computer products is littered with "perfect" systems that lost out to good systems released earlier, and accomplishing most of what people want.
      • JulianMorrison 19y ago
        Usually there was some other complicating factor, like massive over-charging. Meanwhile better systems have come from behind (Word beats the entrenched but poorly ported Wordperfect at the DOS/Windows changeover).