Comment by redisman | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by redisman | Hacker News Reader

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Hilarious criticism coming from software engineers which is never late or over budget. Even when there’s nothing actually novel in the product

I don't want to tell NASA/ESA/CSA how to operate, but I haven't heard of a single software product that launched 10 years late. Such a product would be immediately DOA because of how fast technology moves. Obviously a space telescope is literally rocket science, so it's nothing like the next popular JavaScript library, but I think NASA could adopt a little bit of the move-fast-break-things mentality. Apparently they're running Python 1.5 on the JWST ffs.

All I'm saying is there's room to improve. JWST would be a monumental success for humanity even if it launched 20 years late.

I can count so many I can't even decide where to begin. This being the classic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Fore...

"The video game Duke Nukem Forever spent fifteen years in development, from 1996 to 2011."

yeah most get cancelled before that time, so you don't hear about them.

I don't think you should be risking anything when there's $5bn at stake and a single failure can cause you to lose all of it

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