Path: eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!not-for-mail From: ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: The Beauty of Finished Software Date: 1 Jan 2024 18:35:18 GMT Organization: Stefan Ram Lines: 29 Expires: 1 Dec 2024 11:59:58 GMT Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: news.uni-berlin.de GsCSuyY3NAYTxXXs9wiKSwd18OJE5QqmpfkJr58+eOIP7b Cancel-Lock: sha1:Lq7e0IzN6Rj6sXNwxXd9kjd1Hc4= sha256:gqs8M3qt+FlQCR8vFdzsjxtB0PUI671b0cGIMyjx5FQ= X-Copyright: (C) Copyright 2023 Stefan Ram. All rights reserved. Distribution through any means other than regular usenet channels is forbidden. It is forbidden to publish this article in the Web, to change URIs of this article into links, and to transfer the body without this notice, but quotations of parts in other Usenet posts are allowed. X-No-Archive: Yes Archive: no X-No-Archive-Readme: "X-No-Archive" is set, because this prevents some services to mirror the article in the web. But the article may be kept on a Usenet archive server with only NNTP access. X-No-Html: yes Content-Language: en-US Accept-Language: de-DE-1901, en-US, it, fr-FR Ben Collver writes: >Subject: The Beauty of Finished Software I have so many programming /projects/. It would be nice if I would ever finish one of those! >> I hate some of >>these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it >>becomes a capital. Often, one can just go to the "Settings" dialog and turn this off. >Finished software is software that’s not expected to change, and >that’s a feature! You can rely on it to do some real work. Another example would be Donald Knuth's TeX. >In a world where constant change is the norm, finished software >provides a breath of fresh air. Payment models are important for software manufacturers today, where something comes in annually from the customers who use the software. This may be possible with constant software, but perhaps they at least want to give customers the illusion of constant "improvements". Internet connections are a great idea for this, because then threats can be identified that require constant "security patches" by the manufacturer to defend against them. Bugs also help.