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> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.
* Large number of people and orgs willing and fighting to take credit. If you need 1 week of support from an org, forget it unless you give them large credit worth a huge amount of work. This means you need to justify that credit via creating more work.
* Centralized internal product offerings which act similar to government given monopoly companies (think AT&T before breakup). Since that is the only entity offering that product, their offering doesn't have to compete with the in market offerings and thus can be as bad as needed, as long as it is tolerable.
* Everyone laser focused on their own org size and org power. This means tons of metric chasing, a lot of which requires creating work. For instance, if writing an if else can have a big impact delivering a lot in revenue, you write 5 new applications to soak up the revenue impact and show that something big was done. (A brilliant 2 liner regardless of impact will receive some claps but won't do much for the org power).
* The slowly increasing number of incompetent hires. The politically savvy ones survive and keep moving up and keep doing whatever needed to increase their power.
Which brings up another reason why some of these projects were Fast -- they operated in places where there there wasn't existing infrastructure or residents to deal with, or cut corners on planning and mapping, which future projects now have to deal with.
https://sfstandard.com/transportation/van-ness-brt-bus-rapid...
Immediately after breaking ground, construction delays began. Existing maps of old gas, water and sewer lines flowing beneath the center of Van Ness Avenue proved inaccurate, slowing excavation and causing the city to bring in utility contractors. The utility placement also made the BRT’s center-lane design a challenge: Any future sewer and water repairs would disable bussing for the duration of repair. Plus, overhead bus electrical wires would need to be fully removed for the safety of the crews. Water and sewer infrastructure needed to be moved to the outside lanes to keep the center-lane BRT design — deemed the best for traffic flow.Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing that saved an estimated couple of million lives comes to mind.
COVID19 vaccine was 2021, wasn't it? Just slightly outside the decade. A lot of war-equipment got spun up in 2022 and 2023 extremely quickly, but I don't think people are talking about that. ----------- EDIT: The 2010s through 2020s were a period of incredibly low interest rates and cheap money. Most projects were thinking long-term, for good reason. When interest rates are 0% and you got free money / free borrowing,…
> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.
> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd...
Seems legit.
> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days And thousands of developer years have been wasted smoothing over pre ES6 JavaScript warts.