Against software development
I&#x27;ve been meaning to give a lightning talk about a related subject someday, called &quot;Why Software Sucks&quot;.<p>Basically, software hovers along the fuzzy line between &quot;barely works&quot; and &quot;doesn&#x27;t work&quot;. When we start a project, it doesn&#x27;t work. We add code until it barely works. Then we break it, so it doesn&#x27;t work. So we add enough scaffold that it barely works and can support the new features, until we break it again, and the cycle begins anew. This is actually embedded as principle in TSTTCPW (the simplest thing that could possibly work), but attempts to waterfall our way out by careful planning are generally doomed, due to unintended consequences and such.<p>Eventually, the software becomes broken and no longer worth fixing (and thus gets abandoned), or it hits feature complete while (barely) working. And what happens when it&#x27;s &quot;complete&quot;? Do we say &quot;Thank goodness, finally I can go fix all those bugs and design flaws!&quot;? No, never.<p>Instead, we drop that blecherous losing piece of crap as fast as we can and go start on the shiny new project that&#x27;s been cooking in our minds, the one we couldn&#x27;t work on because we were hacking our way through the wretched ball of mud that is our old code, wasting time in frustration and shame, just to get it off our plate. So we start working on the shiny new thing. And <i>this</i> time, the code will be good. <i>This time</i>, it won&#x27;t suck.<p>Yeah, right.