Re: 10 years to write good software?

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jul 20 2001 - 00:07:55 MDT


> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/stories/storyReader$368

I wouldn't experience too much despair just from hearing the words "10
years". I think a more accurate title for this paper would have been
"Software is FINISHED maturing after ten years." After all, one of his
main recommendations is that once software passes the ten-year mark, you
should try to relax the pressure to add new features because the good ones
are already taken. That's pretty darn mature, I'd say.

The article doesn't say quite so much about time to widespread adoption,
time to stable release, and so on, although it does recommend that one
avoid widely announcing the 1.0 version because it can make a permanent
bad impression. Still, progress in software continues, and not all of the
neat new stuff we hear about today started development three years ago.

-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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