A systemic problem with computer software is scope creep – by their nature, programmers will never declare anything finished. Programmers without constraints will just keep writing more and more, adding features and creating bigger and more complex things,
WordPress seems to have this disease particularly bad – every week or so there is a new version (same with Firefox). Out in the real world, people don’t just click “install upgrade”. Software has to be tested for compatibility and security holes – and might force hardware upgrades costing millions of dollars.
So WordPress announces today that WordPress 3.2 (code name Gershwin) is here! Yippee!
However, support for IE6 is dropped. IE7 users will be told they need to upgrade. The software requires the latest and greatest versions of PHP and MySQL to operate – forcing me to try to upgrade that software on Fedora 6, which runs just fine, but is no longer supported.
One of my recent examples of software feature creep is within PHP – for whatever reason, someone thought the PHP language needs a feature that will tell you the time the sun will rise and set given a date and a latitude and longitude. That’s something that belongs in a library (if at all), not in the core language. Pretty soon PHP will add in a feature to suspend processing if it is currently the time I’m supposed to be facing Mecca and praying.