Re: Ada, Software Engineering and

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3AED8BA4.FA51431E@boeing.com>, Jeffrey Carter says...
>Precisely. And it is because people generally associate a negative
>connotation with "weird" that I use the word. After all, I'm saying to
>98% of the population that we can do something that they will never be
>able to do. Even though this is worshipped in some people, it can still
>be a dangerous thing to say.

I don't think it's all that off to spin it negatively anyway. I've had long
conversations with intelligent dedicated "hackers". In their opinion, any effort
past the minimum required to get the job to where it can be considered "done" is
tantamount to stealing from the company/customer. Your typical user doesn't want
to pay the time and cost associated with quality software work. 

A good example from another field is car repair. I've got a minor oil leak in my
car. I have a very good repair shop that I like to go to. They told me that
there's a bad gasket going into the ignition chamber (or something like that).
They said the dealer would just do enough work to get at the gasket from the
outside, slather it with some kind of sealant, and be done with it for a couple
hundred bucks worth of labor. It might still leak a bit later, and makes other
things really tough to fix, but it would do the job. But my shop's mechanic
wants to do the Right Thing, which is to take the whole damn thing apart and
replace the gasket with a better one, which would be about $800 of labor. Now as
a S/W Engineer, I really respect their desire to do the Right Thing, even though
it will certianly cost them business. But as the "user", there's no way I'm
going to pay $800 to fix a very slow oil leak in an 8 year old car.

I think that most of people out there work at whatever it is they do just to
make a living. Only a very few of us, in any walk of life, feel that if we are
going to spend most of our lives doing this stuff, we owe it to ourselves to put
in an effort that we can look back at and be proud of.

"The Rise of ""Worse is Better""", the cannonical treatment of this issue, is
available online at
http://www.ai.mit.edu/docs/articles/good-news/subsection3.2.1.html

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