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Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - Posts

Blaming the Tool

My copy of SauceReader has been broken for the past week and a half and I miss having it.  I posted the bug on their board and some other people have run into the same problem. 

Somebody posted the question “Anybody think that SauceReader should be written in a different language?” in response to the issue of .Net installs.

The hair on the back of my neck raised straight up.

Reflexively playing the 'blame-the-tool' card is automatically suspect in my estimation.  Strange, hard-to-find bugs can appear on any language and any platform and is 99 times out of 100 a far greater reflection of the developer than the tool.  I would immediately look at the toolset they are using day-to-day and what visibility they have over runtime conditions. 

This case reminded me of a project at a local fortune 500 company that had been written in 8 languages over the span of 7 years.  This included Python, C++, Java and Smalltalk.  The real problem was that the project was grossly ill-defined and each time the project inevitably failed, the contract programmers would recommend another “better fitting“ tool.  For some unknown reason, the heads of IT would keep throwing money at the project.  In subsequent positions I've had the pleasure of interviewing people who have been on that project.  Needless to say, those interviews are quite entertaining. 

posted Wednesday, October 13, 2004 1:36 PM by sdhebert




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