Re: [TUHS] Favorite unix design principles?

[Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com>]

Tyler Adams writes:
>
> For sure, I've seen at least two interesting changes:
> - market forces have pushed fast iteration and fast prototyping into the
> mainstream in the form of Silicon valley "fail fast" culture and the
> "agile" culture. This, over the disastrous "waterfall" style, has led to a
> momentous improvement in overall productivity improvements.
> - As coders get pulled away from the machine and performance is less and
> less in coders hands, engineers aren't sucked into (premature) optimization
> as much.

It's interesting in more than one way.

The "fail fast" culture seems to result in a lot more failure than I find
acceptable.

As performance is less in coders hands, performance is getting worse.  I
haven't seen less premature optimization, I've just seen more premature
optimization that didn't optimize anything.

My take is that the above changes have resulted in less reliable products
with poor performance being delivered more quickly.  I'm just kind of weird
in that I'd prefer better products delivered more slowly.  Especially since
much of what counts as a product these days is just churn to keep people
buying, not to provide things that are actually useful.