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The thing is the "Think carefully and create deliberately" approach has been tried so very few times. But when we have tried it we've gotten Lisp machines, ACID

The thing is the "Think carefully and create deliberately" approach has been tried so very few times. But when we have tried it we've gotten Lisp machines, ACID RDBMs, strong typing, and many other important and very useful tools. I'd say it's worth a shot more often. We know we're in a world of hurt now, but the argument against it is "oww. Devil we don't know!". Math is hard, lets go shopping.

nostrademons 12y ago
The "think carefully and create deliberately" approach has given us a lot more than that - there's also Smalltalk, Xanadu, Eros/E, NextStep, BeOS, microkernels, Plan9, Dylan, and General Magic. A look at that list is pretty instructive for why more people don't take the "think carefully and create deliberately" approach: by and large, the creators of those projects failed to profit from their inventions. In many cases, they wasted years of their life slaving away in pursuit of perfection, and the market didn't care. If you study any of the systems I mentioned, you'll find some incredibly elegant and beautiful CS concepts, ones I wish I could use for every-day programming all the time. But the problem is that none of these innovations exist in a vacuum, and in the time it took to perfect the product, the market passed them by and the world changed in a way that made them no longer relevant.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
"We" and by that I mean software engineers, used to do the 'Think carefully and create deliberately' all the time, we called it software architecture. But "They", and by they I mean software engineers with a 'ship it' culture, got stuff to market faster and improved it faster, and called it 'ship and iterate'. Lots of people were called out as "old fogeys" or "dinosaurs" when they asked to think through some of the ramifications of shipping things. Those folks got trained that such behavior is a quick way to get managed out of an organization. It would be interesting if, as an industry, wave 3 (which like wave 2 before it is a decimal order more engineers than its preceding wave) decided to go back to a more mindful way of developing software. And if so they could remain employed amongst the wave 4 cohort.

nostrademons 12y ago

The "think carefully and create deliberately" approach has given us a lot more than that - there's also Smalltalk, Xanadu, Eros/E, NextStep, BeOS, microkernels, Plan9, Dylan, and General Magic. A look at that list is pretty instructive for why more people don't take the "think carefully and create deliberately" approach: by and large, the creators of those projects failed to profit from their inventions. In many cases, they wasted years of their life slaving away in pursuit of perfection, and the market didn't care. If you study any of the systems I mentioned, you'll find some incredibly elegant and beautiful CS concepts, ones I wish I could use for every-day programming all the time. But the problem is that none of these innovations exist in a vacuum, and in the time it took to perfect the product, the market passed them by and the world changed in a way that made them no longer relevant.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

"We" and by that I mean software engineers, used to do the 'Think carefully and create deliberately' all the time, we called it software architecture. But "They", and by they I mean software engineers with a 'ship it' culture, got stuff to market faster and improved it faster, and called it 'ship and iterate'. Lots of people were called out as "old fogeys" or "dinosaurs" when they asked to think through some of the ramifications of shipping things. Those folks got trained that such behavior is a quick way to get managed out of an organization. It would be interesting if, as an industry, wave 3 (which like wave 2 before it is a decimal order more engineers than its preceding wave) decided to go back to a more mindful way of developing software. And if so they could remain employed amongst the wave 4 cohort.