A good parent fights tooth and claw for their child, and gives it every opportunity they possibly can to enable it to succeed. (And isn’t afraid to show tough love either when that is what is needed.)
Sitting with your thumb up your ass expecting success will come to it automatically just because it’s deserving is the mistake I made. And that was no minor me-too indulgence; it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put end-user automation into the hands of millions. And all that investment and future potential crashed and burned at the very last step to mass adoption, because while I was a good programmer I was a terrible product manager.
Any idiot can write code. That’s the easy part. It’s all the other stuff you need to work hardest at if you’re to build a successful market. ’Cos if you fail to put bums on seats, the best code in the world ain’t worth squat.
Indeed. I think it’s telling that the opening question on that Reddit thread identified the exact same problem I did, and three months on they still haven’t fixed it. Programmers who fail to provide their users’ needs simply because it doesn’t interest them to do so is a cancer throughout this industry and culture. As a 30-year computer user myself, that is an attitude I expect from children, not from supposed “professionals”.
I don’t care how nice your language is, I care about whether using it is going to make my life better… or worse.
If folks here think I’m bad-tempered and unforgiving, then consider I’ve had to spend the last 20 years teaching myself to program just so I’d no longer be at the complete mercy of those “real programmers” who one too many times made my life shit.
In turn, I’ve done my share of making users lives both better and worse, and while I accept that shit happens I don’t tolerate me messing other people around any better than others messing me.
It’s meant to be called “Computer Science” for a reason. And you should see the size of the knives that real scientists bring to a science fight. I’m being kind.
Well this is it, isn’t it. Because really, what the hell is its USP†? The world already has a perfectly cromulent Rust language. Adding a second, less popular one merely dilutes both efforts; and to what purpose? Ego? Control? Simple unwillingness to accept a direct competitor has already beaten their ass to market and mindshare?
Everyone knows the name Charles Darwin. Now ask them who Alf Wallace is, and why they should they should care. Or Yohan Blake. Or Atty Osborne… and so on.
Where’s the advantage in being an also-ran? It’s a tough but necessary lesson to swallow: accept your lovely technology is just too late to be the successful product you hoped for. Treat the whole exercise as a valuable learning experience, and move on to your next Big Idea as quickly as you can, this time, of course, making sure to get to market before your direct competitors can, so as to leave them in the dust instead of you.
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† Their website doesn’t say. Just a technical features list, and yep, one look: Rust, but a lot less mature with waaay less ecosystem and support. That’s not a winning proposition; that’s a sucker’s deal. Damn but every computer geek needs to do a marketing course.
The key to being a competent software developer is really, really simple: Learn the Business. Because if you can’t/won’t/don’t understand the problem domain, how can you expect to solve problems in it?
Why? Because most programmers are lazy, arrogant, self-serving children.
Given the choice between learning the business – requiring lots of talking to users to understand what they do and why they do it, and then writing very plain uninteresting code that servers those business users’ needs – or learning whizzy new CV-enhancing technologies and using them to invent excitingly complicated and interesting software problems so they can spend all their time solving those problem instead, which do you think the indolent bums are going to embrace?
A good parent fights tooth and claw for their child, and gives it every opportunity they possibly can to enable it to succeed. (And isn’t afraid to show tough love either when that is what is needed.)
Sitting with your thumb up your ass expecting success will come to it automatically just because it’s deserving is the mistake I made. And that was no minor me-too indulgence; it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put end-user automation into the hands of millions. And all that investment and future potential crashed and burned at the very last step to mass adoption, because while I was a good programmer I was a terrible product manager.
Any idiot can write code. That’s the easy part. It’s all the other stuff you need to work hardest at if you’re to build a successful market. ’Cos if you fail to put bums on seats, the best code in the world ain’t worth squat.