are programmers "failures"?

[David Hayden]

With today's programming languages, you can achieve a lot more in a few lines of code than you could in 1962. So even when a program doesn't work perfectly, it still does a lot. This means that there's a lot more reward for your effort than there was in '62.

Also, I think that writing a program from scratch is more like carving a statue. You'd never say that an incomplete statue is a "failure" and that artists endure days of failure before their product is done. It just takes time to get it right.

Quote:We certainly don't. We have Agile! I envy everyone who was able to retire before this idiocy started to spread.

Ain't that the truth!

Agile is sort of "how to fix software development as told by project managers."

• "It goes way off schedule!" We'll have short milestones
• "It doesn't work!" We'll creating working programs and keep modifying them till they're right
• "It doesn't do what the customer wanted!" We'll have frequent demos
• "We spent all our time designing!" We'll just build and modify until it's right
  

Agile is an awesome way to manage a Project file and a horrible way to manage software development.

When they implemented it in our company, I kept asking "what problem are you trying to solve?" We're a group of experienced developers who've worked together for 20 years. I never got an answer to my question. Fortunately, we've figured how to make it look like we're doing Agile while mostly carrying on as before.