Comment Re:It's remarkable that people still do this (Score 1) 616
If anything, I think both industry and academics are holding back progress by being too conservative in their choices of languages, all too often going with what happens to be pushed by commercial vendors and/or used by other people at the moment. For example, the duplication of effort that has gone into making things work in Java that already worked in other programming languages is positively staggering. And as far as I am concerned it has been a huge waste of time and effort, because Java wasn't when this started - and to some extent still isn't - a great language. Don't get me wrong; I think the switch to Java was a leap forward for the industry; I just wish people would have jumped to a better language.
In my experience, all software development is high risk, high return. Because the risks are high, and because so few people know anything about software development, there is tendency to use a conservative approach to language and technology by selecting large vendors or recognised "brands".
As it turns out, this is actually the worst possible way to reduce the risk of software development, but this has not yet become apparent for a number of reasons.
1) Software development, unlike bridge building, has not been practised for thousands of years, so there is no comparable canon of knowledge to draw best practices from.
2) Software project failures are not published for forensic analysis that could be used to improve the state of the art.
3) Software is a ridiculously profitable business for the few that succeed at it, and so vendors spend their greatest efforts on marketing their wares to people who (a) are the decision makers in business and (b) are clueless about software development.
Personally, I don't see much towards a solution to these problems in the open source movement, because egos tend to get in the way of admissions of failure.
In my experience, all software development is high risk, high return. Because the risks are high, and because so few people know anything about software development, there is tendency to use a conservative approach to language and technology by selecting large vendors or recognised "brands".
As it turns out, this is actually the worst possible way to reduce the risk of software development, but this has not yet become apparent for a number of reasons.
1) Software development, unlike bridge building, has not been practised for thousands of years, so there is no comparable canon of knowledge to draw best practices from.
2) Software project failures are not published for forensic analysis that could be used to improve the state of the art.
3) Software is a ridiculously profitable business for the few that succeed at it, and so vendors spend their greatest efforts on marketing their wares to people who (a) are the decision makers in business and (b) are clueless about software development.
Personally, I don't see much towards a solution to these problems in the open source movement, because egos tend to get in the way of admissions of failure.
