If you want to talked about the real needs of industry/business
for software development, then forget about the code, focus on the
software and what it does.
Times are extremely tight in the manufacturing industry right now.
Existing products are being dropped, and new product developments
are being halted. In the decision to drop a product or halt a
project, I've never once heard the quality or the modularity of the
code mentioned. In fact, I've never even heard the maintainability
of the code mentioned. The prime criteria, virtually the only
criteria, is customer demand, a. k. a. usefulness of the product.
Most of the dropped products were weak sellers from day one.
One might argue that this is because their internal architectures
are so screwed up that they were never able to put in the features
that customers wanted. While I can imagine cases in which this
might be so, some of the dropped products had internal architectures
that were unbelievably elegant while others that are still going
are masses of bad code and are a maintenance nightmare. (You can
imagine the reaction of some of the better programmers when they
were transferred off what they considered to be well constructed
code and were told to help develop and maintain the messes.)
The fundamental problem the dropped products faced, the problem
that resulted in their eventual demise, was that none of the products did anything
that anyone, or enough anyone's, wanted done.
While I appreciate the viewpoint that good code development is
an intellectual challenge in its own right, sort of like chess,
personally, I like to think that I'm doing more good in the world
than providing entertainment for coders. (Whoops, I may be straying
into a discussion of religion and morality.) In any case, for
those who are crassly commercially motivated, figuring out what
functionality will be useful to the people who actually use the
software remains the single greatest challenge.
Ruven Brooks
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