- #Mistakes made in pro engineer wildfire 5.0 textbook pro#
- #Mistakes made in pro engineer wildfire 5.0 textbook software#
- #Mistakes made in pro engineer wildfire 5.0 textbook code#
“Well,” they say, “look at this function. “I’d like nothing better than to throw it out and start over.” “It’s a big hairy mess,” they will tell you.
#Mistakes made in pro engineer wildfire 5.0 textbook code#
They write their own function because it’s easier and more fun than figuring out how the old function works.Īs a corollary of this axiom, you can ask almost any programmer today about the code they are working on. This is why everybody on your team has a different function they like to use for splitting strings into arrays of strings. It’s harder to read code than to write it. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. Lucky for Microsoft, they had never stopped working on the old code base, so they had something to ship, making it merely a financial disaster, not a strategic one. Microsoft almost made the same mistake, trying to rewrite Word for Windows from scratch in a doomed project called Pyramid which was shut down, thrown away, and swept under the rug.
#Mistakes made in pro engineer wildfire 5.0 textbook pro#
Borland made the same mistake when they bought Arago and tried to make it into dBase for Windows, a doomed project that took so long that Microsoft Access ate their lunch, then they made it again in rewriting Quattro Pro from scratch and astonishing people with how few features it had. Netscape wasn’t the first company to make this mistake. They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
#Mistakes made in pro engineer wildfire 5.0 textbook software#
They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They didn’t do it on purpose, now, did they? It’s a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta.
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