Re: Hokay, I officially give up...

This seems like a good time to repeat the most clever observation I've ever
made about programming:

*Software hovers around the line between barely works and almost works*.

This has nothing to do with technology. It's human nature. Given the
resources (time, skills, tools) needed to write software that more than
barely works, almost everyone from the lowliest hacker to the biggest
megacorporation will choose instead to write *more* software, or more
complex software. New functionality is added or new ideas pursued until the
software degenerates from "barely works" to "almost works". At this point,
either the effort is made to get the software back up to the barely works
state, or it just gets worse until it is abandoned.

Threading got you down?  Practical threading for day-to-day software didn't
even exist when I started my career in software. Parallel programming was
exotic, the techniques unique to certain hardware and languages. Today, it's
basic. Buggy, but basic. So when threading gets fixed, it'll just be some
other mystery bug that gets you down, something else breaking your software
in apparently random, untraceable ways. And when THAT gets fixed, software
will find some new way to keep you challenged and miserable.

Want purity? You can go the Donald Knuth route, devoting your life to
writing software that is as flawless as possible. But I wouldn't be
surprised to find that, if this observation was raised with him, he would
agree that it applies even to his own work.

This rule is context-specific. What "barely works" for high availability
enterprise computing would be considered phenomenal quality for a small
e-commerce website - and a tremendous waste of valuable resources as well.
By real-world requirements, the software in your microwave barely works, and
the space shuttle avionics barely work. The best we can usually do is to
find sufficiently challenging problems that attaining a "barely works" level
of quality is at least rewarding.

-- 
-dave

"Why doesn't the Earth fall?  How can you walk upon it?  It's the music.
 It's the music of the Earth, and the Sun, and the Stars.  It's the music of
yourself, vibrating.  Yes, you are music too! You're all instruments.
 Everyone is supposed to be playing their part in this vast Arkestra of the
Cosmos."

-Sun Ra

music - http://www.extraterrestrialhighway.net
photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/dstagner
etc - http://sitdownshutup.wordpress.com