On Sat, 20 Aug 2005 14:14:23 +0200, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

> > 1) Software ought to be good enough that it doesn't require
> >     significant support.
> 
> Yeah, same for cars!

Right, but back in The Real World...

Cars wear out, rust away, fail to comply with new regulations...

Software doesn't usually wear out (y2k notwithstanding) but it can fail to cope with new situations - changes 
in the law, economic situation (new taxes, new field sizes due to inflation, etc), and new ideas that people 
come up with.  

DOS was a fairly support-free operating system, but almost nobody uses it now because someone thought of WIMP 
interfaces (we won't argue about who that was!).  Before PCs there were mainframes and minicomputers - and the 
software that they ran is mostly obsolete now through no fault of the programmers - the World moved on and 
their stuff wasn't relevant any more.  Some may have been ported to the new environments as they came along - 
that's still "support" !

Someone once asked me: "Don't you feel insecure in your job (software developer) because one day all the 
programs will have been written and you won't be needed?"  My reply was that I felt the same way as builders, 
worrying that one day all the houses will have been built!

What actually happened, of course, is that most of the programming effort was moved abroad, so my job did go 
away, but not in the way that anyone envisaged back then.  Oh well - anyone want to hire a jack-of-all-trades 
computer person with about 30 years' experience in the industry?

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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