Xah's Edu Corner: IT Industry Predicament

[Xah Lee]

IT Industry Predicament

Xah Lee, 200207

As most of you agree, there are incredible wrongs in software industry.
Programs crash, injurious tools, uninformed programers, and decrepit
education system. Over the years of my computing industry experience
since 1995, i have recently gradually come to realize the cause and
plan a solution. I wanted to write a cohesive account of my thoughts
one day. Here's a quick beginning:

• Most agree that computing industry has lots of problems, including:
extremely poor software quality, poorly qualified programers, and a
strayed education system. One final metric is the quality of today's
software, and consumer's experience with computers.

• In pretty much free market system of America, we can say that
software quality (or software related things) being the way it is is
out of natural selection. In other words: “driven by economy”, or,
a result that evolved naturally from competition.

• This naturally evolved result, does not mean it is the “best”
outcome. Simply put: “outcome” does not mean “desired outcome”.
Think of it this way: the solutions from genetic algorithms arn't best
solutions, but best outcome from a given set of criterions and gene
pool and the coupling environment.

• We can see now that the state of software or industry is not
determined by idiotic and simplistic expectations such as quality of
design or intelligence of programers. How things come to be in society
do not have simplistic explanations, but sensible understanding is not
impossible. In a commercial software world, software's popularity or
trend is determined by the choices consumer makes. How consumer ends up
purchasing a software has a myriad of factors among them awareness, but
most responsible being the price/performance ratio, or just price.
Also, the majority of consumers are morons with respect to evaluating
software for their own good. This is why, the inept and FREE unixes and
Perl and C are everywhere. It is also why, the fucking incompetent
unixes though $free$ but has little place to stand in comparison to a
charging Microsoft when performance also enters the equation. This also
explains, the exorbitantly priced fashion-statement Apple
software/hardware combo are no more populous than those affluent. (not
because some fucking fashionable chant about how
good-things-are-always-unpopular fucking fuck chant loved by vain
above-it geeks.)

• The reason fucking languages like C and family mask technically
superior ones like lisp are in large part due to the unix phenomenon as
explained above. C + Unix, incompetence + irresponsibility
bootstrapping each other $freely$. The unix things teach programers to
unthink. With their greed-based speed-based freely-distributable
popularity-based iconoclastic irresponsibilities spreading like
corruption do.

Solution: Understand and spread the word that writing bug-free software
are not difficult at all, and quality software can be as intuitive as
extra hands. When good programers understand this and catch on, good
software with responsible licenses will emerge. Eventually software
vendors will compete for more responsible software, one's that offer to
be penalized for every bug or crash or misfeature. In turn, this will
eliminate all fucking fashions and idiots in the software industry such
as the Design Patterns and eXtreme Programing or the TIMTOWTDI Perl
fuck or the OOP fad or the fucking “Universal Modeling Language”
fuck.

Do you want software/industry to improve? Everyone want to be
millionaire when asked, but when they have to pay to be a millionaire,
they reconsider.

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