On Oct 22, 2010, at 12:22 PM, William Piel wrote:
We need to be okay with seeing a rich plethora of quick-and-dirty efforts, each focusing on articulating/investigating sets of novel ideas -- despite some obvious redundancy in some of the more general functions. And then periodically, someone's got to assemble the best of these ideas into a robust, jack-of-all-trades, off-the-shelf software package.
That sounds nice indeed, but frankly I've never seen it happen. The quick-and-dirty efforts that I have seen become standard parts of reusable and sustainable software have almost all started from their early beginnings as parts of reusable software. For a while rather experimental and unstable parts, obviously, but the future course was charted not as an afterthought.
Truth of the matter is that we're all scientists. No scientist is interested in, or gets promotion, scientific recognition, or publications from assembling entirely incompatible, mostly redundant except for a few features, quick-and-dirty pieces of software into some grand jack-of-all-trades software package.
My $0.02, from about 13 years of software engineering.
-hilmar