Random realities of programming | Hacker News Reader

Random realities of programming

clemesha.posterous.com

35 pointsclemesha14 comments

"Projects will take either 3 times as long or 10 time as long - which is exactly the time it takes you to become disinterested, and interested in your next project."

In the forward to the 1995 version of the Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks talks about the axes of expanding a software program. On one axis you go from a program to a "programming product", and that takes 3x effort. On the other axis you turn a program into a "programming system" and that takes also takes 3x effort. To go from a "program" to a "programming system product" takes 9x effort.

So I was struck by how close the numbers were.

Sorry for being such a pedant but I really can't stand to see more misspellings of foreword. It's "foreword", everybody, not "forward", not "farward", not "forword", not any of the thousand uglier varieties I've lately run across, sometimes even in published (and supposedly edited) books.

Apologies, it was a typo. I know how to spell it.

#6. Oh the shame.

Mine's called "support" (.pm, .c, .py etc)

No shame man, we're all in this together.

8) Software is never finished. It is abandoned. ~Corey Sanders

My code isn't "released" so much as "escapes".

Also, #1 used to be true, but nowadays I'm more often amazed that people use technology Y, when clearly everything else is better. Even starting from scratch.

I am glad to see I am not the only one constantly confusing useradd and adduser.

I always remember because I associate easier/proper grammar with user friendliness: "adduser" is proper and runs the prompt-based script for adding users, whereas useradd is the unix command that goes along with userdel and usermod, etc.

Heh, thanks for the tip, we'll see if that works for me next time. I am definitely one of the adduser challenged.

nitpick on that point ... how is that related to programming? seems more like unix sysadmin/IT knowledge

e.g., a veteran programmer working in a MS Windows environment all his/her life would never run into something like this

Have you tried using PowerShell for something non-trivial? It's equally prone to this kind of problem as Unix command lines.

As far as I know you don't even have a single standard cmdlet to create a user in AD using PowerShell - you have to install the Quest tools for managing AD through PowerShell to get a sensible set of commands.

I don't get them confused, because I don't do sysad work.

I do, however, frequently frown at the similarly-named "createuser" command which (as I'm sure you guessed from the name) adds a user to a PostgreSQL database cluster.

package util, we meet again.

I've created and killed one of those in the past 48 hours. "It's never a good idea," I said on Wednesday. "Well, maybe this time," I said on Thursday. "No, it's never a good idea," I decided on Friday.

At least I come to my senses quickly these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com