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Now here's a random thought.
There are several computer systems out there which basically started off
either as small-scale experiments, or as a single person's personal
useful tool. These then "escaped" and became wildly popular, despite the
fact that they were never properly designed and scale horribly.
There should be a name for that... but I can't think of one.
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Le 07/03/2011 11:18, Invisible a écrit :
> Now here's a random thought.
>
> There are several computer systems out there which basically started off
> either as small-scale experiments, or as a single person's personal
> useful tool. These then "escaped" and became wildly popular, despite the
> fact that they were never properly designed and scale horribly.
>
> There should be a name for that... but I can't think of one.
>
DOS ? BIOS ?
Insert whatever holywar you want to see.
--
Software is like dirt - it costs time and money to change it and move it
around.
Just because you can't see it, it doesn't weigh anything,
and you can't drill a hole in it and stick a rivet into it doesn't mean
it's free.
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On 3/7/2011 4:18 AM, Invisible wrote:
> Now here's a random thought.
>
> There are several computer systems out there which basically started off
> either as small-scale experiments, or as a single person's personal
> useful tool. These then "escaped" and became wildly popular, despite the
> fact that they were never properly designed and scale horribly.
>
> There should be a name for that... but I can't think of one.
>
Viral computing ;)
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>> There should be a name for that... but I can't think of one.
>>
> DOS ? BIOS ?
> Insert whatever holywar you want to see.
PHP? Perl? Unix?? Erlang?
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Invisible wrote:
> There should be a name for that...
Crappy.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"How did he die?" "He got shot in the hand."
"That was fatal?"
"He was holding a live grenade at the time."
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Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> Now here's a random thought.
>
> There are several computer systems out there which basically started off
> either as small-scale experiments, or as a single person's personal
> useful tool. These then "escaped" and became wildly popular, despite the
> fact that they were never properly designed and scale horribly.
>
> There should be a name for that... but I can't think of one.
useful?
If it does the job well and is useful to many people it certainly becomes
popular, regardless of design or scalability.
Bottom-up designed, one-shot programs that do one thing well is best design to
me. Too much abstraction and generalization -- that is, scalability -- usually
derail into many conflicting interfaces and poor performance.
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>> There should be a name for that... but I can't think of one.
>
> useful?
Usually a more accurate description would be "only just good enough that
it keeps anyone from making something better".
> If it does the job well and is useful to many people it certainly becomes
> popular, regardless of design or scalability.
>
> Bottom-up designed, one-shot programs that do one thing well is best design to
> me. Too much abstraction and generalization -- that is, scalability -- usually
> derail into many conflicting interfaces and poor performance.
Abstraction is /not/ the same thing as scalability.
Abstraction is something that you might /use/ in an attempt to achieve
scalability, but you may or may not succeed, depending on how you do it.
Scalability is a measurement of whether something *actually* scales, and
is not directly related to how it was (or wasn't) designed.
Poor performance is the exact opposite of scalability.
(And, for that matter, it's the systems that *weren't* designed that
usually have "too many conflicting interfaces", not the ones that *were*
designed.)
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On 07/03/2011 05:08 PM, Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> There should be a name for that...
>
> Crappy.
Well, yeah. ;-) But crappy in a specific way. A way that's different
from, say, "we put out a product which we know is broken because we can
make money out of it", or "we tried to make a product do everything" or
any of the other ways that a product can be crappy.
I don't know... Escaped experiment? Unexpected success? Gem?
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Invisible wrote:
> I don't know... Escaped experiment? Unexpected success? Gem?
Success failure.
Altho that tends to apply more to things like unscalable web sites that get
overwhelmed with traffic. Sort of the "problems we'd like to have" category.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"How did he die?" "He got shot in the hand."
"That was fatal?"
"He was holding a live grenade at the time."
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Invisible wrote:
> Poor performance is the exact opposite of scalability.
I think it depends on whether you're talking about scalable at runtime or
scalable at coding time. I.e., is it a question of how big a program you can
write, or a question of how big a program you can run?
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"How did he die?" "He got shot in the hand."
"That was fatal?"
"He was holding a live grenade at the time."
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