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,<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So WordPress announces today that WordPress 3.2 (code name Gershwin) is here! Yippee!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading