Howard Chu (hyc@symas.com) on 2/18/08 wrote:
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>nick (no@mail.com) on 2/17/08 wrote:
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>>But seriously, it is quite obvious that there is supply and demand at work, and
>>you simply can't just brush that under the carpet without telling us how you plan
>>to switch the world to controlled economies.
>
>Funny you should mention that. I was thinking a good way to start would be to outlaw marketing.
>
>There certainly is supply and demand at work, but it is being heavily manipulated
>by marketing which mostly consists of outright lies. In a free market with accurate
>information, the demand for junk products would dry up. There are already people
>objecting to the proliferation of bloatware - it's human nature to want good stuff
>and avoid bad stuff. In a networked world with ubiquitous, instantaneous access
>to information, it's *possible* to have an educated market that consistently avoids
>the junk. We're not there yet because we don't have review sites that are free from
>the financial influence of their product suppliers, and we don't have consumers
>that are universally informed enough to know to look before they buy. Education is a partial solution here too.

OK, perhaps making tougher laws against incorrect or misleading marketing would help. But if we are debating this seriously, then there are economics involved and I simply don't see how you can definitively claim one way or the other.

At some point, effort will be better spent on something other than education.


>>So given that we actually have a lot of crappy programs and not-so-good programmers
>>around, what this actually means is that software is so important to people that
>>they are willing to pay for a poor product. Pricing them out of the market by reducing
>>the number of programmers will not help them. What will help them is increasing
>>the quality and productivity of the supply of programmers.
>
>>Education is definitely one way to go. It is by no means the most cost effective
>>or the only way to go. So increasing the quality and/or quantity of the poor and
>>average programmers output (by means other than education) definitely has value.
>
>Increasing the quality, ok. Making life easier for lazy programmers, I'd rather
>not. Those guys can go be lazy in somebody else's industry, or find work that they
>enjoy so much that they're always motivated to go do it.

OK, but that's kind of an elitist view. I'd be all for it, but it isn't going to happen just because you say "no".


>Education may not seem cost-effective in the short term, but short term perspectives
>aren't ever going to solve anything.

No it's just simply that other things can help too. Put it this way: suppose you spend $x to educate one average programmer into a good programmer (say, 10x the value of their old output). And you could alternatively spend $y in order to improve the output value of the average programmer by 50% by developing a better tool. Then it is just a simple equation as to where the cut-over point is.

There is simply no arguing around that, unless you actually have the numbers to throw around.