Quote:
Originally Posted by BWinmill
Perhaps a professional software developer can answer this question: the notion of good and poor programming practices have existed for decades. While there is some disagreement as to what those practices are, they are typically emphasize maintainability and are among the first things that people learn when they learn how to program. Modern languages and libraries facilitate these programming practices. When we are talking about ereaders, there are typically sufficient resources to use those languages and libraries. Given all of that, how is it possible to make code so obtuse that it is difficult to add an extra font size?
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There are many reasons why most commercial software ends up with a less-than-perfect design.
Among them:
- Most programmers aren't as competent and conscientious as you might like.
- Doing things "the right way" often involves taking a short term hit (in terms of time-to-market etc.) for a longer term benefit of code quality/maintainability etc. Commercial pressures often mean that this short term cost is not paid.
- Management misunderstanding often leads to the long term benefit above to be underestimated, making it even less likely that the short term cost will be accepted.
- Moving goalposts, crisis bugfixes, and other deviations from the ideal design flow all add their own special chaos.
/JB