I'm Sure It Will Only Take You A Few Days To Code

Can anyone define for me the difference between a library and a language? If I take all my functions and put them in a "library" and then just call them, have I made my program shorter? What if I define them all as built-in to the language?

Intuitively, those seem like tricks and not genuine simplifications. Why don't they count?

No real objective measurements for project success are defined or put into place, but at least the executives can say they're "embarking on a technology-driven initiative to improve [area of the business they're responsible for]" and so they meet their bonus criteria for the year, and if they've done everything correctly, the executive's contract will end before the project goes red.

If all doesn't go well, well, that's why you have PMs! They're the "responsibility buffer" - the guys you get to blame and fire rather than the actual executive who initiated the project and failed to provide real support and leadership.

The root of the problem is that producing a modern style recording of music is resource expensive. Far more than anybody would like it to be.

The resources can be time/money/talent. So there is an intense bias on everyone involved in the project to under-estimate.

I usually work on low budget projects. You can actually accomplish a lot with a low budget. But as you start to climb the "quality" scale the costs increase much more quickly than the quality. To get a product that you might consider subjectively twice as good might cost ten times as much.

At core, I feel like there is a fundamental principal of information organization. It takes a certain amount of resources to undo entropy and organize information. When we experience a piece of work we can intuitively feel that entropy has been significantly reduced, we appreciate the accomplishment. (Even if we are not in the field of endeavor we still feel it though we don't know how it is done.)

One specific point of difficulty in estimating time in music production is that there is an x-factor. It derives from the need to create something exceptional, which has both subjective and objective elements.

With an experienced production team you can predict how long it will take to produce something competent. But usually there is a point where we have all done the things we know how to do: the song is arranged, the players are good, the production environment is good, the instruments are good. But the song is missing something. What is it? It is not known yet. So an iterative trial and error process begins. Let's try a different singer. Maybe we should borrow my friends guitar. Let's keep recording. Let's rewrite the song.

Hopefully a solution is arrived at, but since it is a trial and error process it is impossible to estimate how long it will take.

The library/language distinction seems less important these days (e.g. standard libraries are often thought of as part of the language). There is (usually) a syntactic distinction, of whether it's a keyword (global availability and tightly limited), or namespaced in some fashion (local availability, and limitless/open-ended).

ans: 1. syntactic/expandability, 2. yes, 3. yes, 4. they count in the wider system (as OP, I just meant you don't have to write it)