(From 1997!)

I often tell people: "This software is as complicated as the Space Shuttle. But the Space Shuttle cost a billion dollars to make, and had ten thousand people working on it, and ..." I pause for effect. "It still blew up... Twice!"

This overwrought statement elicits smiles from most, but some people take it very literally. Very serious, they might say, "at work we use oil and gas pricing software, and it's way more complex than this." I arch my eyebrows in surprise but I'm civil enough not to cast aspersions on someone's "oil and gas pricing software." It is indicative, however, of the low esteem some people hold programmers. It comes from watching too many Hollywood movies where a thirteen year old "hacker" breaks into the Defense Departments computer and saves the world with nothing more than a modem and clever password deduction. The very complexity of computers has reduced people's respect for them - there's no understanding of what all's going on in there. Plus, wrap a ten dollar piece of sheet metal around a trillion dollars worth of R&D, and all of a sudden, the lack of ascetics begs derision.

But there's even more overt market pressure that comes into play - software is essentially "free." Except for the business community, cowered by Microsoft's attack lawyers, all software is 99% pirated. How can anything that's "free" possible be worth anything? Has there ever been another product on earth that requires so much R&D for so little perceived value? The music industry thought they had it bad until computer software copying truly showed how all-pervading piracy could actually be.

Recently my high school-aged son, Heath, was taking drafting. His instructor was recommending that all of the students learn to use some "Beta" 3D modeling software available as a download from the net. Heath asked if he could use Animation:Master instead, since it was more than just modeling. His instructor's only response was, "is it free?"

Actually, Nasa and the space shuttle program is run by two 13 year olds. All those images of workers in a huge control center are faked. It's just those two kids in a small room with a couple of computers. They feed them duritos, pizza and soda. Every few years they are replaced with new 13 year olds. The worst of it is, they use a modified open source "oil and gas pricing" application to run the whole thing.



-vern

OH YEAH???....welllll...I worked on the real-time system for the Image generator for the space shuttle simulator, and trust me ....we made the software wayyyy more complicated than it needed to be.

Complexity isn't always something to brag about.

I was 14.

I have always admired programmers and once started learning C++.
Much respect to programmers. Without them we would still be typing out DOS commands.
and something like animating would be a monster task!

DOS was developed by them too... we wouldnt have any computers, because hardware without software cant do anything...
The difference was, that people at that time worked in Assembler and not C++ or something like these high-level-programminglanguages...
I learned Java in my study but I never really got into it...

I am "programming" in PHP, Javascript, ActionScript and JSPs(while I think that you really dont need it if you can use php)... which are mainly script-languages for the web and real programmers will smile on that...
and even that can be challenging for me... but people who can program in C++ or Java are really gods to me...
I don't have a problem to pay for it... but of course I am looking for a low price too...

*Fuchur*

I think I could justify the high cost of software if each copy of the application had to be hand typed by someone. Instead of making copies they should have secretaries typing away and compiling the code for each disk. Or like the car industry, they could use robots programmed to type on keyboards to produce the programs.



Do I really need to add the or will someone think I'm serious?

-vern