Joel Spolsky’s latest essay, “Strategy Letter VI,” offers a smart analogy between the desktop software wars of the 1980s — when companies like Lotus bet on producing code that could run on the slow, small-memory machines of the present, only to lose as PCs got faster, quick — and the Web-based software wars of today.
I think the following passage about Web-app development today could even be read as a (partial, qualified) endorsement of Big Ball of Mud:
The developers who put a lot of effort into optimizing things and making them tight and fast will wake up to discover that effort was, more or less, wasted, or, at the very least, you could say that it “conferred no long term competitive advantage,” if you’re the kind of person who talks like an economist.
The developers who ignored performance and blasted ahead adding cool features to their applications will, in the long run, have better applications.
[tags]joel spolsky, web development[/tags]
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