relational for what? [was: Design Principles Behind Smalltalk,
Revisited]
Howard Stearns
hstearns at wisc.edu
Tue Jan 2 23:14:26 UTC 2007
Peter Crowther wrote:
>> ...
lots of good comments. (Thanks.)
> I suspect you're coming from a
> background of solving "hard" problems, where throwing tin at the job is
> acceptable, to a world where return on investment determines whether a
> project can be justified or not. ...
Heh. Bingo.
But the other side of the coin is that so many projects in this "easy
problem" world are failures. A higher failure rate than the clean-slate
hard problem world!
I've had a $300K hard-problem budget zero'ed because, in part, the last
easy-problem folks spent $26M (some say $52M) to implement a very
standard three-tier system that didn't work. OK. I get that. This is the
way it is, and I've got plenty to say about that, too, over a beer.
But I'm an engineer. I want to understand why the three-tier projects
fail. And how to avoid that. I know that there are people who can make
them succeed despite the math, using leadership and operations research
and charm and ruthlessness and lots of money, or whatever. But that's
not my domain. I may not have the choice to always pick the right tool
for the job, but I do want to try to understand what makes something the
right (or wrong) tool.
--
Howard Stearns
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Division of Information Technology
mailto:hstearns at wisc.edu
jabber:hstearns at wiscchat.wisc.edu
voice:+1-608-262-3724
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