Category: Software

What makes good software? I always felt this question was too big for me to answer, never seeing myself as astute in the software development business as the big guns like Herb Sutter, Raymond Chen and the likes. However, this is a blog and as blogs go you can post something today and say the opposite tomorrow. Still, I couldn’t resist putting the word “current” in this post’s headline to emphasize that my opinion may change in the future.

Over the years my view of software development changed a lot. During my studies I was an “enthusiastic purist” developer – the kind that will always look for the newest paradigms and techniques, trying to follow and use them in my own code. That was the enthusiastic part. The purist part of me insisted on following the good practices I learned along the way. There are very few good practices that are true no-matter-what, the most important one being DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself.

While working as a software developer I noticed that, no matter the company I worked for, the level of acquaintance of existing programmers with these new techniques was very low. They may have heard of some, but no one would dare use them. Most developers stick to what they already know. The effect of this being that even if you know how to write something in a “new” way, you have to educate the other developers and convince them that there is an actual benefit to using your way. This is a good thing because it works like a peer review process, but with the natural resistance to change it becomes very hard to actually use new techniques in an existing company.

Over time I learned that what makes software successful is happy users. No big surprise there, right? But the reality of things is that making software which users will like on time usually comes on the expense of the way the software is implemented. I’m not the first to say that software development is about making compromises, but if you’re an “enthusiastic purist” that realization can be a little depressing. I had to learn to compromise in order to deliver software on time. I still think this is a little unfortunate because in every piece of software there’s room for improvements – in design, in speed, in beauty – improvements that probably will never be made.

In short, I learned that

Software should:

1. work well for the user, and
2. be implemented in a way that allows known future developments

These are my (current) two principles of software development. I consider their weight equal, but if these two principles still contradict each other – the first one should be preferred (or the deadline should be postponed once again.) Otherwise, you will not have users left to use your future developments. The second principle contains in it as many good practices as needed, but unfortunately not more.

I would have loved to add another principle, namely “be well implemented” or “be well designed.” However, in the real world, where companies develop products until they’re most profitable (and not a second more), we don’t have the luxury of having another principle like that. Working on the first two takes most of our time.

In a recent post I wrote that I installed the non-free driver for my video card on my new Ubuntu Linux installation. A friend asked me why I had to pay for the driver. I didn’t.

The word “free” has two main meanings in the software world:

• Costs nothing (also known as “Free as in beer”)
• Liberty (or freedom)

The first meaning is easy to understand, but what does it mean that a piece of software has freedom? Wikipedia explains free software as follows:

Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. To make these acts possible, the human readable form of the program (called the source code) must be made available. The source code may be either accompanied by a software license saying that the copyright holder permits these acts (a free software licence), or be released into public domain, so that these rights automatically hold.

Here’s an example of software that is not free: Microsoft Word may just be the most used office productivity application in the world. To read and write a Word document perfectly you have to use Microsoft Word (*). Using Microsoft Word binds you to a format that is not free (unpublished) and forces you to use a specific program. By using Microsoft Word you have given up on your freedom to choose a document editing program. So because the file format isn’t free (as in freedom) you are not free.

As an opposing example, consider another document file format like ODF. ODF is a published Word-like file format that is available to all and so when you edit an ODF file you may choose out of a bunch of applications that are equivalently good at editing the file.

So my choice of a non-free driver for the graphics card was pretty much like choosing Microsoft Word over a different application and file format (with the exception that it was at zero cost). The non-free driver may have given me extra effects on my computer screen but I gave up some freedoms as I made the choice. I start wondering, even though I didn’t complete the move to my new (freedom-free) Linux installation, whether this freedom is something that needs to be protected even if the software is available at no cost forever, just like we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide (again a link to the excellent Coding Horror blog)

For more information about free software, visit the Free Software Foundation website.

* There are other programs that read and write Word documents, but they reverse engineer the Word file format. The reverse engineering is never perfect and can be targeted specifically by the Microsoft to be nearly impossible.

I was looking today at a post on Engadget called “Desktop Evolution: Windows and Mac OS Visual Comparison Through the Years” and expected to see how, over the years, the desktop became more and more beautiful and usable. But I was extremely under-impressed.

Windows Vista looks nice but nothing really exciting (also, I can’t ignore the fact that the best looking Vista both costs a lot and requires super-new hardware.) The latest OS from Apple, Mac OS X 10.5, is supposed to be innovative but also looks like a slightly-more-beautiful clone of its old self. I mean eventually when you’re on a computer, your desktop is not a destination and as nice as it looks, nothing seems to have changed.

Where are the usability benefits? Considering all the great minds working on software today, is this the best we can do with the desktop?

One of the latest most talked about “wars” in the software world is the office document formats war. Both formats are XML based, and both are used to describe the miscellaneous office documents like Word and Excel documents. The OpenDocument format was developed by a committee and is already an ISO standard. OOXML, on the other hand, was developed by Microsoft and isn’t yet an ISO standard. Microsoft has been pushing and lobbying OOXML (Open Office XML) very hard to become an ISO standard.

However, from a technical point of view, OOXML is barely manageable. The format contains in it the legacy of all Microsoft Office’s previous versions and is impossible to edit correctly by external tools despite the fact that it is so-called “open”. Stéphane Rodriguez wrote 10 technical points why OOXML is defective by design. In one of the points, Rodriguez quotes one of Bill Gates’ memos that was exposed because of a legal case:

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Saturday, December 5 1998
To: Bob Muglia, Jon DeVann, Steven Sinofsky

Subject : Office rendering

One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of
the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.

I would be glad to explain at a greater length.

Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well.

While making Office documents work only in Internet Explorer is a legal move by Microsoft (and I’m not even sure about that), obviously it’s an anti-consumer move that locks non-IE users out of the ability to view some documents online. Therefore there’s no surprise that Microsoft tries to appear to have an open document standard while in practice creating another proprietary format that can only be correctly used in Microsoft Office.