In the previous post Make it Right I
asked the question
Why aren’t more people making it right?
I was curious why people don’t take the time to write software properly. There
are lots of jokes about bad software development:
If houses were built the same way programmers build programs, we’d all be living on
the street.
Unfortunately it’s a fair statement. Most programs out there suck*. I
used to come back with the argument that people have been building houses for thousands
of years, but software for only a few decades. There are bound to be issues.
But then it occurred to me.
Mike Holmes is all about making it right, as I said in the previous post. His
TV show was about fixing the problems that professionals made. Professionals
who have been building the same thing people have built for thousands of years.
Wait a minute. I just flawed my own argument.
Houses are built the same way programmers build programs.
Why?
I see three very apparent reasons.
-
Cheapness – People want software built quickly, as cheap as possible.
-
Laziness – Why strain your mental processing or follow best practices when you can
just do whatever first comes to mind?
-
Uneducated – Sometimes (a lot of times) the person doing the building/development
just doesn’t know what they are doing.
There are numerous other reasons why, but these three are by far the biggest across
all aspects of building stuff. I think they answer the basic question asked
earlier, but now I have another question.
Why do we let people who are lazy or uneducated build applications for us, just so
we can save a few bucks? We will end up paying loads more in support after the
fact…
*I said programs, not programmers.
