

Random realities of programming - clemesha
http://clemesha.posterous.com/7-random-realities-of-programming

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ojbyrne
"Projects will take either 3 times as long or 10 time as long - which is
exactly the time it takes you to become disinterested, and interested in your
next project."

In the forward to the 1995 version of the Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks
talks about the axes of expanding a software program. On one axis you go from
a program to a "programming product", and that takes 3x effort. On the other
axis you turn a program into a "programming system" and that takes also takes
3x effort. To go from a "program" to a "programming system product" takes 9x
effort.

So I was struck by how close the numbers were.

~~~
HSO
Sorry for being such a pedant but I really can't stand to see more
misspellings of foreword. It's "foreword", everybody, not "forward", not
"farward", not "forword", not any of the thousand uglier varieties I've lately
run across, sometimes even in published (and supposedly edited) books.

~~~
ojbyrne
Apologies, it was a typo. I know how to spell it.

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noonespecial
#6. Oh the shame.

Mine's called "support" (.pm, .c, .py etc)

~~~
clemesha
No shame man, we're all in this together.

------
crosvenir
8) Software is never finished. It is abandoned. ~Corey Sanders

~~~
prodigal_erik
My code isn't "released" so much as "escapes".

Also, #1 used to be true, but nowadays I'm more often amazed that people use
technology Y, when clearly _everything else_ is better. Even starting from
scratch.

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mattew
I am glad to see I am not the only one constantly confusing useradd and
adduser.

~~~
Slackwise
I always remember because I associate easier/proper grammar with user
friendliness: "adduser" is proper and runs the prompt-based script for adding
users, whereas useradd is the unix command that goes along with userdel and
usermod, etc.

~~~
nicpottier
Heh, thanks for the tip, we'll see if that works for me next time. I am
definitely one of the adduser challenged.

------
Dove
package util, we meet again.

I've created and killed one of those in the past 48 hours. "It's never a good
idea," I said on Wednesday. "Well, maybe this time," I said on Thursday. "No,
it's never a good idea," I decided on Friday.

At least I come to my senses _quickly_ these days.

