There is a whole class of rhetorically attractive analogies comparing programming to the building of physical things like furniture, bridges, and buildings. They usually overlook that software requirements vary greatly and can be quite complex, while the physical requirements of a chair are not going to vary much across chair designs. Modification of software requires no physical resources and can be executed at scale (e.g. package managers), while modifying the design of a chair once it has shipped is impractical. Software errors can certainly be consequential, but I'd much rather encounter a bug in a messaging queue than a defect in the chair I'm sitting on or the bridge I'm driving over.
Finish your stuff
11–20 of 104 posts
Re: Finish your stuff
#12Any software tool that is deemed as "complete" is not really complete. Even TeX, which will be releasing its final version when Donald Knuth feels the end of his life is near, is not complete because it is constantly expanded with reimplementations like XeLaTeX and LuaTeX and with thousands of plugins in constant development. GNU utilities like ls are not complete because they are built on top of operating system syscalls which are changing due to updated filesystems, and on glibc which releases a new version every 6 months. A change upstream might trigger ls to be changed, so it's not finished, just evolving slowly. Just look at its git history http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/log/src/ls.c, where the last change was three weeks ago. GNU Make, mentioned in the article, is still evolving. Look at its history. http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/make.git/log/
Re: Finish your stuff
#13I get the problem with feature creep (who wants a text editor that also implements support for tetris?! ^•^), but as others have pointed out, that sentiment probably isn't precise enough to be all that useful.
Being a command line junkie, what stands out to me is the composability of my tools. This composability, I feel, is the key that let's us separate concerns and write small, standalone tools.
Re: Finish your stuff
#14There is a whole class of rhetorically attractive analogies comparing programming to the building of physical things like furniture, bridges, and buildings. They usually overlook that software requirements vary greatly and can be quite complex, while the physical requirements of a chair are not going to vary much across chair designs. Modification of software requires no physical resources and can be executed at scal…
> They usually overlook that software requirements vary greatly and can be quite complex
Or change after it's built. "Oh yeah, I guess we'll also need a floor to set our chair on. And perhaps a foundation for that floor." Later: "I know I said I wanted a chair, but what we really wanted was a glider."
Re: Finish your stuff
#15This sounded oddly familiar, until I read about the projects Libmill and Ribosome. And yeah it's a post already submitted in 2015 and should be labeled 2015.
The link to Ribosome led to a shopping site, I was disappointed.
Re: Finish your stuff
#16What would that look like? Consider an example: You have made a little web app that beeps at certain times of the day to remind me to do something. Is it complete? Oh, you want a calendar integration. That makes sense. You add it. Is it complete? Oh, you say you want to release mobile versions? Okay, now is it complete? Sorry, but the iOS version needs to be updated to remain compatible. Now is it complete? There is…
I feel like unix philosophy applies more to libs and small CLI tools more than full blown web apps with evolving feature sets.
Or you build an integration / plugin system, and each new feature is a self-contained plugin to do that one thing well.
Re: Finish your stuff
#17Somebody has given up a significant amount of their time to give you something that's free as in beer and speech. You get at least what you pay for, don't ask for your money back.
Re: Finish your stuff
#18This sounded oddly familiar, until I read about the projects Libmill and Ribosome. And yeah it's a post already submitted in 2015 and should be labeled 2015.
The link to Ribosome led to a shopping site, I was disappointed.
Found the repo - https://github.com/sustrik/ribosome
Re: Finish your stuff
#19> it's almost impossible to find anyting that's truly finished, not simply abandoned. This goes far beyond programming. "completeness" is nice but is highly subjective. For work that can be infinitely revised, refactored, recut, "finished" is an idea you impose from the outside, in relation to specific criteria. The author seems to be saying that there is value in creating smaller, independent modules of things that…
> This goes far beyond programming. "completeness" is nice but is highly subjective. For work that can be infinitely revised, refactored, recut, "finished" is an idea you impose from the outside, in relation to specific criteria.
This is why I think a "definition of done" is so valuable on a dev team, especially in a startup environment. Without it, there's just natural inconsistency or variability across people and features.
Re: Finish your stuff
#20What would that look like? Consider an example: You have made a little web app that beeps at certain times of the day to remind me to do something. Is it complete? Oh, you want a calendar integration. That makes sense. You add it. Is it complete? Oh, you say you want to release mobile versions? Okay, now is it complete? Sorry, but the iOS version needs to be updated to remain compatible. Now is it complete? There is…
That is called feature creep, and is usually not viewed in positive light. Its real art to know how to decompose problems and design neat, contained, solutions.
I'd also argue that the "change" you are seeing is mostly illusionary, but that is another story altogether.