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Yes, some tools are toys without much use. I don't dispute that. But to make a blanket claim that no tool is useful, "not in a million years", is completely wrong. The real world full of real people has benefitted tremendously from certain software projects. Those projects have in turn benefitted from others, which benefitted from others, etc. Not all software is involved in the chain, but a lot is. Software does things like predict weather (saving thousands, perhaps millions, of lives and vastly improving other lives), help design buildings and machines, allow people to communicate over extremely long distances at very little cost, etc. etc. All of that software was enabled by various developer tools that have been built over the years. Tools like FORTRAN compilers, UNIX systems, make, gcc, VMS, etc. etc. All of those have been extremely useful. Indirectly, they have been extremely useful to real people in the real world. So why do you say that "not in a million years" would anything we build be useful. Maybe what we build isn't, but it certainly can be, and a lot of it is. Is what I'm doing extremely useful? Probably not. But if I wanted it to be, the answer isn't to stop programming and go vaccinate kids. The answer is to apply my software skills to areas which are useful in general. The results don't have to be directly useful to "real people" to be indirectly useful to them. Building some Facebook clone is probably not all that useful. But to come along and act like all software is simply an act of privilege and is never useful to "real people" is just plain wrong. |