Jacques, >software" industry (ie Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, Octave, Scilab, etc), the >users seem to be highly forgiving, and the support costs are very small. As >long as the core features work, all the advanced features can be really buggy, >it does not matter.
This is where the psychology of programming could be relevant to industry. Knowing in advance exactly which bugs in a program need to be fixed because users will not put up with them could enable products to be bought to market quicker and reduce unit cost. >overwhelming source of the ``real'' problems. Unfortunately, low customer >pressure has given that industry the complete opposite behaviour: new features >need to be put in, even at the cost of quality, to insure that renewal $$$ >come in. Industry responding to customer demand. Why do people think that companies selling software based products should not act in a way that maximises their profits? Another topic of research for ppigers! > environment I was in, the things that mattered were 1) new flashy features, > and 2) backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility. Customers love it, developers hate it. Customers pay developer salaries..... Now customers don't pay open source developer salaries. I wonder how many often used open source tools will break backwards compatibility in future releases? Perhaps one day in retirement I will get the urge to a tinker with gcc. Being paid to write compilers means I have to pay attention to existing code (i.e., a compiler that will not correctly process existing code is considered unusable). It would be very liberating not to have to worry about those old programs that rely on some quirk of a long dead implementation, with which they were originally developed, to work correctly. Sounds like a good little earner for my retirement. Pay me a retainer and I won't work on gcc for free :-) derek -- Derek M Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667 Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([email protected]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
