The Power and Paradox of Bad Software

See The Power and Paradox of Bad Software on www.wired.com

In this article, Paul examines the phenomenon where software made for developers is very good (comparativley at lest) whereas things most professionals use (doctors, procurement officers, contruction workers) are really bad. For instance, for all the sexy JavaScript tools and libraries out there, climate research runs on FOTRAN and loads of people (like contact tracers) use Excel.

I’m rather skeptical of the idea that dev tools are always great, but sotware out of that truly sucks. I hope to help others make great software someday.

The idea was for software to become the humble servant of every other discipline; no one anticipated that the tech industry would become a global god-king among the industries, expecting every other field to transform itself in tech’s image. There’s a thing in programming: Code has a way of begetting more code. You start hacking on some problem, and six months later you’re still hacking at it, adding features. You write code that helps you write more code. But what we don’t do so much, what our tools don’t help us do, is continually ask, who is this for, why are we doing it, and how will people build upon it?

This is one of the reasons why I wish I was talented enough to learn another field and bring the experiences I’ve gotten there to tech rather than use tech as the proverbial hammer to smash nails with.