Re: Hokay, I officially give up...

Hello, Mathieu.  On Friday, May 22, 2009, at 10:39:11 AM, you
wrote:

> On Fri, 22 May 2009, Dave Stagner wrote:

>> 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.

> Ok, so, for every context, no matter what scale of standards they already
> use, you'd shift their standards so that, no matter what they achieve,
> they'd judge it as "barely works"? No matter the improvements made, the
> scale can be shifted so that whatever has been done still gets called
> "barely works". What's the point?

Since no one could likely have meant anything that stupid, I would
urge you to think a bit about what the point might have actually
been. Makes for better conversations ...

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
www.xprogramming.com/blog
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back
of his head. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs,
but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could
stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps
there isn't. -- A. A. Milne