Slashdot Mirror
On Situated Software - Designing For The Few?
janbjurstrom writes "Clay Shirky has published a thought-provoking (and long) essay discussing the concept of 'situated software', musing on changes in software development, from general systems catering to thousands towards applications 'form-fitted' to small, specific groups and particular social contexts. A lot of interesting observations about the differences." Shirky argues: "Most software built for large numbers of users or designed to last indefinitely fails at both goals anyway. Situated software is a way of saying 'Most software gets only a few users for a short period; why not take advantage of designing with that in mind?'"
Who determines when N-squared is too large? Management has a tendency to maximize profit and therefore to let N get large. If you let software go in the wild under these conditions it's only a matter of time before a manager asks his techie why the software that worked yesterday doesn't work today, or why it's going to take a month out of his quarter for re-design if we want to change the forum or layout of the group.
Writing form-fitting software is not an asymptotic approach to design and breeds laziness in all levels of design in a design group. Change is the nature of the market and software written for that market must be able to handle that change.
Cheaper and faster doesn't teach the programmer anything; in fact this dulling effect can bore a programmer out of his job. Just because you ignore scalability doesn't mean the software has fewer scalability issues. You'll find the simplest changes much more challenging than they should be. If users aren't willing to learn software (or any other skill) to do their job better, this also breeds mediocrity.
How rare is it to find programming talent that can't write utilitarian software? Software programmers are born lazy. This is the nature of all inexperienced and un-trained programmers. With experience in a field, skills become secondary to philosophy. When you focus purely on skill and ignore philosophy you become doomed to peak at mediocrity; thus the world before XML and other important abstractions.
I thank God that mathematicians are free to think asymptotically. If their creativity were confined to industry they would be pressured to stick with 4 function calculators and work everything else out on the fly.
I would suggest that a program like "Teachers on the Run" contain the ability to setup a basic schema via an INI file so the schema can be changed based on the needs of the user very quickly and easily.
The trade-off in popularity came when your programmers got geeked about their product - which is very healthy. But the fact that we live in different locations of the country and we both have heard of ratemyprofessor.com proves that when Web School app developers get excited, indeed the oceans and the continents start to heat up.
The pier pressure on deadbeats approach works only in the vacuum of an academic setting.
"We rarely rely on the cognitive capabilities of groups, however, though we rely on those capabilities in the real world all the time." A large part of industry is trained to perform daily functions - novelty only occurs when a new system is implemented, and contrary to popular belief many people don't use icons because they're drawn toward the usefulness of the pictures, but out of trained procedure and rote documentation. When we use schemas that developers can easily modify, we allow the trained and very bored masses that ability of having a deeper understanding of the system, which improves their ability to submit change requests, not to mention the improved ability to train new employees.
The two mid-term critiques might have been a reflection of people finally learning a centralized abstraction such as the Web. Remember the web is still new to most people even though it's been around for 10 years. As it permeates our culture you'll be more and more blown away at how well users integrate higher technology into their lives. I'm amazed every day when I hear non-technical types talking about upload sizes, bandwidth limitations, proxy servers (etc.) like they were talking about an episode of Oprah.
Do you think it would be harder for most kids born in the 80's to use a web form or a beta-max interface? Most kids born in the 80's have never heard of beta-max, and apart from novelty might quickly ask those important questions.
Deploying services on an Intranet would solve your physical layer issue with web deployment.
"everyone knew and trusted Scott" - again, this only works in the vacuum of an academic setting.
In the information age, where the ent
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.