Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Thursday, June 20, 2002
18:52 - �Software sucks because users demand it to.� http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/mann0702.asp	(top)
Here's a good, revealing article on software design from Charles C. Mann of Technology Review. It's got some brusque remarks in it from Microsoft's former CTO (from the 80s era) and the usual kind of comparisons to space-travel technology and car design that you would expect in this kind of article. Most refreshingly, it points out the fact that software design is fundamentally different from other kinds of engineering-- "If a bridge survives a 500-kilogram weight and a 50,000-kilogram weight, Pfleeger notes, engineers can assume that it will bear all the values between. With software, she says, 'I can�t make that assumption�I can�t interpolate.'" It also notes that software is inherently buggy because customers demand new features all the time. As I've mentioned before, devices like digital cameras and MP3 players are in that bleeding-edge phase that personal computers have exemplified in macrocosm for twenty years now: every six months, a company brings out a device that's twice as good as its previous one, just to keep pace with the competition and the demands of the available technology (which keeps changing just as fast). From a stereo-design or car-design or bridge-design standpoint, such thinking is insane. How much longer can we expect to keep this up? Moore's Law can't keep on going forever, can it? Will there come a time when CPU cycles and RAM are so cheap that no amount of programmatic complexity can drive hardware upgrades? Obviously not for decades at least, or even centuries-- even when we have fully-functional holodecks and transporters, there will still be a demand for still more complex computing tasks. At least, that's the impression of technology that I get from Star Trek-- even over the course of a few fictional decades of a hypothetical future, such new developments as holographic doctors and food replicators are greeted with the same fervor that we emit today over the newest gadgets and peripherals. And because of the egalitarian nature of software creation, the limits on what software can do are still imposed by hardware rather than by human imagination-- as will continue to be the case for a long time, I suspect. And we can't treat software as an exception to the rules of engineering, either; as time goes on, software will become more and more important a part of the engineering world-- and sooner or later, mechanical and civil and electrical engineering will be treated as the poor cousins of software engineering, the latter of which will be so ubiquitous that its rules will be the ones bent to accommodate the rest of the world's disciplines, not the other way around. Ready to start thinking about quality-control at Ford in terms of defects per kLOCs?