Why software is so bad ...
MSNBC | at | by Mike
It's one of the oldest jokes on the Internet, endlessly forwarded from e-mailbox to e-mailbox. A software mogul - usually Bill Gates, but sometimes another -makes a speech. "If the automobile industry had developed like the software industry," the mogul proclaims, "we would all be driving $25 cars that get 1,000 miles to the gallon." To which an automobile executive retorts, "Yeah, and if cars were like software, they would crash twice a day for no reason, and when you called for service, they'd tell you to reinstall the engine."
"Software's simply terrible today," says Watts S. Humphrey, a fellow of Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute who has written several well-known books on software quality. "And it's getting worse all the time." Good software, in Humphrey's view, "is usable, reliable, defect free, cost effective and maintainable. And software now is none of those things. You can't take something out of the box and know it's going to work." Over the years, in the view of Edsger W. Dijkstra, an emeritus computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, the average computer user "has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed."