"Tony Tanzillo" <·············@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Unfortunately, you're the one that's missing something. As superior
> as you may view yourself, you are part of a dying culture that will
> not even warrant a footnote in the pages of history.
If relatively simple pc software is the whole software market you see,
it might even be true (as frightening as it sounds for the poor users),
but there are - and will remain - quite a few application areas where
the cost (whether monetary or human health/life) of a serious software
failure is just too high to let "become a wizard in a week"-programmers
work on the non-trivial parts of the system. No visiual debuggers or
similar gadgets will change that.
> > One can also aim to optimize what one perceives to be right
> > within the constraints of being able to survive sufficiently well.
>
> You obviously have very little real-world business experience.
>
> My advice to you is to stay within the confines of your academic
> sanctuary,
Hmm, I've been working for several years now on a commercial integrated
work-flow and documentation system for power plants (other industry kinds
may join in near future), which is continuously developed and successfully
used since more than a decade by several large and small customers, works
on different mainframe and workstation operating systems, and is currently
being redesigned/reimplemented towards a more thorough distributed/client-
server architecture to enable various forms of distribution (depending on
e.g. the size of an installation and allowed delays for recovery in case of
component failure). Judging from the amount of money this costs a customer
(where of course, the software price is a only one aspect of this cost),
and given that it saves more already due to the shortened down-time during
a single revision of a nuclear power plant (which has to be done annually),
I'd say this is very much happening in the real world of business.
(Btw, I tend to have quite good contacts with people performing diverse
functions - like consulting, development, user support - in this company,
so I get to know what's happening beyond my own field of work, too.)
-- Marc Wachowitz <··@ipx2.rz.uni-mannheim.de>