Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Dr. What
From : Adept
Date : Fri Feb 16 2024 14:23:13

 DW> I've experienced too much pain where we had a developer who decided New
 DW> Tech X was cool and then built a critical production process around it. 
 DW> Never mind that no one else on the team was interested in New Tech X,
 DW> didn't know New Tech X and New Tech X didn't do a much better job than
 DW> the current tech.

Yeah, shiny new things. Though, also, it's generally more fun building something up yourself than figuring out what the heck the last twenty people were doing with this code that's supposedly self-commenting.

 DW> problem.  Many companies out there will support you - for an arm, a leg
 DW> and your first born.  But that's usually a good indication that you
 DW> should be moving on.  And they were trying to do that, they just kept
 DW> derailing themselves.

Makes sense. So, yeah, they did need to move on to something else, but they needed to actually make a choice and follow through on it, regardless of what the choice was.

Though a large amount of tech projects fail, regardless. Just hard to get it right.

But if your program looks like NASA's rocket building after the Space Shuttle, there may be too many bosses, changing too often, to get a good outcome in a reasonable amount of time.

(That one shouldn't be too political; it takes time to build a space program, and if each president wants to put their stamp on things and have a bold new vision, that winds up meaning that the bold new vision will cancel out much of the previous work. Presumably the effect would be the same at Kmart.)

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