Dabo in 30 seconds?

[Cliff Wells]

On Mon, 2005-08-01 at 16:21 +0200, Daniel Dittmar wrote:
> Cliff Wells wrote:
> >  But then I'm willing to
> > actually work a little to get what I want.  For other it seems they
> > won't be happy unless you drive to their house and install it for them
> 
> To be fair to those slothes: some of them want to write software for a 
> commercial setting where they have to install it on other peoples 
> machines. So it isn't just getting it to work one one own's machine. 
> Using a specifc Python library with external dependencies means also 
> installing and *supporting* it on a possible large set of configurations.

I can understand this, but from my experience, their concerns are badly
misplaced:  I recently wrote a fairly sizable Python app (~8K LOC) that
utilized several 3rd party python librarys: wxPython, Twisted,
FeedParser, DateUtils and SQLite to name a few off the top of my head
(plus I had to repackage libxml and libxslt on OS/X because 10.3 ships
with broken versions :P). 

It ran on Windows and OS/X (and Linux, but that was never deployed as
the customer wasn't interested).  This was for a *very* large customer
and made it to nearly 10,000 desktops.  Not one complaint had to do with
installation of 3rd party packages.  Why?  Because I *packaged* it for
them.  Most of the effort I put in had little to do with any 3rd party
Python library but rather just the ins and outs of each platform's
packaging tools (and this can be no little pain I assure you).  I will
also note, out of fairness, that the port to OS/X was not as pain-free
as I had hoped (wxPython was fairly new to that platform and I found
more than a few bugs - most of them are resolved now, because I didn't
just give up when I found them, rather I reported them and <drum roll>
they got fixed!  Who would have thought?!).

In short, these people's complaints reveal only two things: 1) they are
hopelessly pessimistic, whether out of pure laziness, lack of experience
or what I'm unsure and 2) they've never actually tried very hard or
perhaps even at all. Overall that's a recipe for failure in any
endeavor.  As I mentioned earlier, programming is half brains and half
tenacity.  If you lack one or the other, your chances of success are
pretty slim.  The sad thing is that their ability to cling so
tenaciously to such an unqualified position leaves me wondering if it
isn't truly the first quality that they lack.  Given how easy Python
makes things, I'd hate to see how they'd fare with a *real* programming
language <wink>.


Regards,
Cliff

-- 
cliff at develix.com
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