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Comment by luckystrike | Hacker News Reader

  Today, a couple of application developers can turn around a decent piece 
  of software for a BlackBerry or an iPhone in a weekend.

<rant>

Yeah, right. I think blanket statements like these are part of the reason many non-technical people think programming is an easy (& cheap) job, and their eyes spread wide when we tell them what it would take to implement their "awesome" idea.

"Oh, I thought we could do this in a week .."

</rant>

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Amen to your rant. We do ourselves a collective disservice bragging all the time about how we can create million dollar software products in a weekend.

I totally agree with your rant, and want to add more reasons :)

First, saying that a couple of devs can turn around an application in a weekend completely ignores the years of software development experience required. Second, it ignores the the specific experience required to develop for an iPhone or BB. Finally, it ignores what type of software.

I can code up a simply utility in a weekend for the iPhone, but it won't have any decent artwork or other niceties that people now expect out of iPhone software. If you look at something like Angry Birds you can see a fairly simple general concept that looks great and is executed perfectly. Something like that does NOT happen in a weekend.

Regarding the stackoverflow link: I think it's telling that the accepted answer is the one the poster wanted to hear (i.e., a very optimistic estimate). I wonder how often such things happen on Q/A sites, and how often it ends up misguiding someone.

But to be fair: the votes on the accepted answer are minus 21 and the votes on the linked answer are plus 648. Democracy works in this case.

Thank you for that StackOverflow link. I can guarantee it'll come in handy when I'm trying to bring someone's expectations back to planet earth.

Relates perfectly to the famous Picasso quote : "This doodle didn't take me 2 minutes, it was 60 years in the making."

To put it another way—it would take a week of typing, not a week of programming.

If the fresh source-code compiles, the software was made long ago.</allusion>

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