Revenge of the nerds

When I was beginning the path to become a software engineer I tended to magnify the problems related to the things I wasn’t very much involved into, because of inexperience.

The Analogy of the pointy-haired boss can apply to many people when they are neophytes to some regard. In the real world it’s something that have happened to me almost every time when the requirements for some software are very ambitious and a pseudo-informed client is involved.

Everybody loves standards, it makes things easier and faster, but also is not always wat everyone needs for achieving their goals. Maybe the client wants the latest and greatest revision of a software that is commonly used for their branch in business, but maybe that version of that software implements functions and new paradigms that are no longer the principal need for the client. These kind of concerns are common because where there is money involved, there is always the need to have security and robustness, but in the software development those are very misunderstood definitions.

Programming languages have different benefits and they’re the best fit for some developments than others. In the first posts of this blog, I’ve talked about the fact that programming languages are in some way equivalent speaking in terms of computability and only that. But there are some limitations that we encounter according to the language we choose and the project we’re on: compatibility, portability, time and work are some of them.

Sometimes the standards are the ones that make things more difficult, they are in fact very important, in my opinion, but the requirements can be really limited by them, so when the standards limit the requirements, we as developers, tend to make things that can be dangerous to memory, design, and even the hardware if we are not careful enough given that we are free to follow (or not) the standards.