Changes in Programming Practices

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2394

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-12-30 13:25:52

It seems to me from casual observation that programmers today work rather differently than they did a few years ago. Today, they don’t actually program most of the features of the applications they market. For instance, look at http://www.codejock.com/products/toolkitpro/. You will see an interface that looks just like the one sported by Ultra Recall. It looks like developers are buying sets of features and porting them into their products. Does anyone know when this trend got firmly underway? Maybe it’s been like that longer than I realize.

This practice, I think, has implications for the way users evaluate programs. Before buying a program, the user cannot ordinarily know how well the program will function under changing conditions of use, probably doesn’t know many of the features of a complex program, etc. Certain characteristics of programs are correlated with others and serve as proxies in the evaluation process. They measure the skill and conscientiousness of the developer.

One such proxy is the amount of development taking place for the application. An application that is getting a lot of new features seems to be receiving the sustained attention of the developer. But the accretion of features is less an index of quality where the developer purchases them wholesale.

It looks like some program are less “pre-fabricated” than others. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing in itself, but it certainly affects the significance of rapid feature accretion. MyInfo, for example, looks unique, whereas Ultra Recall has the “standard Windows look.” UR is a much younger program than MyInfo, but it has more features, and I wonder if the reason has to do with the extent of pre-fabrication, and if so, what bearing that has on evaluating the program.

ADM has been praised for the pace of development, but the pace at which it accrues features is so great, that it seems they must be purchased from another developer, even though the look of ADM is unique, perhaps more unique than some would like. When the developer announced, ‘look, we have a surprise upgrade of the text card, providing for many more word processing features, he would seem to be talking about something he just bought, not something worked up from scratch. (Of course “scratch” has different meanings. Here I mean a basic programming language, not machine language.)

Back to archived message list