[tlug] Not always about scratching an itch

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Darren Cook writes:

 >  2. The examples on the project website cover just about every possible
 > use case, allowing you to quickly confirm it will work in each device
 > you have to support. Contrast this to more complex open source libraries
 > where evaluating if something does what you need can take longer than
 > the rest of the coding on the project.

I don't understand why this comparison is interesting.  Implementing
single features in high-quality software (including comprehensive
coherent documentation) is easy if you're a bit disciplined.  We've
known that since John McCarthy invented Lisp.  Implementing multiple
interacting features with similarly high quality requires *management*
(hiss, boo), and the managers need to be better at what they do than
the programmers are at what they do, or it doesn't much matter how
good the programmers are.  We've known that, too, since /The Mythical
Man-Month/.