August 11th, 2005, 4:17 pm
Funny that no one in this thread talks about programmere productivity (quantity and quality of code)!! When you build a house what's the first thing you think about?Sad to say, I fear your metaphor works against good engineering.When we had a large extension built the local arts graduates on the council made use "compatable" ghastly yellow bricks, and old tiles, rather than efficient new ones.Buildings have to be "in keeping" with others. I live in a nice street, but one with no architectural merit of any kind, why we should have to make part of our house look like the yellow rabbit hutcheson the other side quite escapes me.The City of London is plagued by other graduates who enforce the maintenance of badly built 1950s emulations of mediocre 1900s architecture. Frequently we see the front of a building left standingwhilst a new inside is built, at great cost, but poor structure.This is a clear parallel with the weight of history that stops us making clean greenfield engineering decisions about software.It's worse even than that.If you build a house, you don't have to worry about whether new versions of the bricks will be developed, or whether the manufacturers will make them compatable with the old ones.Many building materials in Britain are of imperial measure, but in metric units, thus you buy 2 inch thick wood by the metre length.In you invest your time learning C#, or commit your group to develop a project in it, you have to worry about it's future.Java has been the victim of mendacious acts by both Sun and Microsoft.C++ isn't as standardised as I would like, but enough for 99% of what I do.Who in our game really cares about portability ?I care a lot more about the productivity that Cuchulainn cites, and reliability with performance normally being third in that list. Portability to me doesn't really get to the top 10.