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Cool article, very not surprised, except by how much this affected him. Every result-oriented group of people will have to compromise somehow, adapt, readjust, fail for a while, succeed for a bit, and fail again. If we were doing it for the art, then we'd have less problem, but just having end dates for payment of delivery is why a guy will make h5 bigger than h4 in css: there's no time, we can't break the existing stuff and hope to repair, we Frankenstein and pray no one cares for 10 years. The thing is that, he's probably vastly exaggerating the effect of this uncleanliness: what matters is to isolate it well enough, make people embrace the problem, reward those who fix it if they can at tolerable cost but not forget that what matters is REALLY the end result. A company can double the cost of maintenance of a beautiful popular interface and still profit well enough EVEN IF, had they spend triple the time with triple the people they could maybe have reached a more logical beautiful internal design... for a bit. Or: is it better to have a fugly rifle or a beautiful water pistol, if your goal is to survive in the jungle ? Even if the water pistol is more durable, perfectly measured, made by people who never stressed, when it's time to face the bear, it's still a water pistol. And the "middle ground" would be half a gun, that's WHY we always end up either with a beautiful useless system, a fugly useful system, or a fugly useless system transitioning to either. |