from the does-THIS-sound-familiar? dept

[sergebroom]

Salon.com posted the article "Software Is Hard"
(http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/02/03/leonard/)

The intro:

"...Salon's Scott Rosenberg explains why even small-scale programming projects can take years to complete, one programmer is often better than two, and the meaning of 'Rosenberg's Law'..."

Then the article begins:

"...One way to look at Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg's new book, "Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software," is as an attempt to tell the story of a specific software development project -- the effort by industry legend Mitch Kapor and a band of ace programmers to create Chandler, a kind of turbo-powered personal information management program that would dazzle users with its ability to enhance their productivity. On that level alone, the book is successful, even though Chandler's development process has been bumpy, and some four years after the project began, it's still not finished..."

I'm not sure I'm ready to read the rest of it yet.

Comments

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Okay. I read the rest of the interview. Here's what Rosenberg says about his project:

"...it turns out to be a software disaster, a classic death march situation in which everything went wrong and nothing worked as planned and when we deployed it everything broke..."

I guess I'll have to buy his book, Dreaming in Code.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Do you dream in code? I've found myself dreaming about political theorists and concepts like the block vote....

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Well, I sometimes dream about code. Early this week, I got up at 2am because I kept dreaming about one of the PfH's test scripts and how it wasn't coming up with good results.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

It sounds as if you need a long break when the project's over.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

That, and a raise, and a new job, and a strong drink.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

All those sound good. Calvados, I presume?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

A full bottle of cheap red wine would do. The thing is that I'm not sure when I could celebrate the end, because I don't know if/when we will ever be able to say the Project is done.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Now that last sounds positively evil. I hope you'll be able to talk about what the project does, or did, then. It sounds fiendishly complex.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

'Evil'? 'Fiendish'? Well, you know, there IS a very good reason why I refer to it as the Project from Hell.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I have not the least doubt.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

"The software that can be compiled is not the eternal software."

Compilers

[miltonthales.livejournal.com]

One of the things that really annoyed me when working on an IBM S/36 was that it would give a count of the number of attempted compiles at the bottom of the (failed) program. I really didn't want to know that my oh-so-simple output spec change had taken me 41 attempts to get it the way the users wanted it.

Re: Compilers

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I don't think I ever worked on one those, although all of my work until a few years ago was on IBM mainframes. Ah, how I remember with nostalgia (not!) the way things were in the early Seventies, student assignments all done on punched cards, and those cards getting spilled all over the floor and my having to manually put them back in the proper order. Hmm... If Evil Rooster reads this, she'll probably think this is starting to sound like "When I was your age, I used to walk to school, two miles in the snow, uphill, both ways." Actually, it was half a mile, on flat ground, both ways, but I did walk to school in the snow.

Re: Compilers

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

After my family moved from England to Jamaica, I had to walk five miles (well, 4.8 miles) in order to catch the school bus to go another 11 miles. This was rain or sun. While we had no snow (at 2,000 feet in the tropics, after all), it could be pretty rough.

Re: Compilers

[miltonthales.livejournal.com]

In the Navy in 1972-1974 we used an IBM 360/20 as the controller for all our incoming/outgoing message traffic (on paper tape). Every morning (local Japanese time -- Zulu time 0000) we ran a 500-card deck through the thing just to reset the date-time for the next 24 hours. I once wrote about that (http://www.linkmeister.com/blog/archives/000519.html).

Re: Compilers

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

That's the kind of stuff that makes one feel prehistoric, eh? Like when a co-worker 10 years younger than me said, when I mentionned having used card punchers, that she had seen one of those once. In a museum. Today's kids... No respect for their elders.

Re: Compilers

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Obviously written by a programmer who hated programmers.