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1. Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 02:44:54 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

   Software development is about solving client problems, not about writing code.

   Code is our foremost method for solving client problems, but lines of code are a liability, not an asset. The fewer you can get away with while solving the client's problem equally well, the better.

   #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #BusinessDevelopment

   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 02:44:48 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to

     • Howard Chu @ Symas
     • Vangelis Kostalas

     @zensoup @hyc I originally wrote this with "user", but a lot of people including me don't like that word and I hate the word "stakeholders". Clients don't have to be paying clients, just someone or some community for whom we're making software.

     It is perfectly valid to write software for oneself, just nerd away for the art and/or fun of it, but even for software written for oneself, more often the software is incidental and serves furthering some non-software goal.

     Lots of people originally considering themselves non-developers get into software this way – linguists, lawyers, biologists, textile designers, tax accountants, visual designers, musicians, architects, farmers, divers ...

   • Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 02:44:52 UTC Howard Chu @ Symas

     in reply to

     @clacke a lot of us write software for personal satisfaction, not for sale to clients.

   • Vangelis Kostalas (zensoup@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 02:44:52 UTC Vangelis Kostalas

     in reply to

     • Howard Chu @ Symas

     @hyc @clacke what if we replaced "client" with "user"?

   • Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 06:50:25 UTC Howard Chu @ Symas

     in reply to

     • Vangelis Kostalas

     @clacke @zensoup I agree with all that, as well as the original point that less is more - the goal isn't to write a lot of code, it's to write *just enough* code to accomplish a task. I just don't like the tendency to frame everything in commerce terms. Harvard MBAs do that, and they deserve the blame for a lot of today's ills.

     Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 likes this.
   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 06:50:26 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to

     • Howard Chu @ Symas
     • Vangelis Kostalas

     @hyc @zensoup That's fair. Feel free to help me improve the wording.

     We write software for play, to learn something, to entertain someone and/or to help someone do something.

     We don't write code to produce lines of code.

     Another hedging statement I could add is that fewer lines of code is not better if it's due to code golf or any other code removal that makes the rest less maintainable.

     Lines of code is a proxy and always flawed, whether you aim for many or few of them.

   • Vangelis Kostalas (zensoup@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 06:50:27 UTC Vangelis Kostalas

     in reply to

     @clacke I agree with what you are trying to say but I believe we should consider maintainability as a primary goal alongside problem solving. And maintainability may sometimes result in more lines of code.

     Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 likes this.