Perfect is the Enemy of Good Enough
Reader response to Those Damned Bugs! by Gene Callahan
Dear Dr. Dobb's,
Gene Callahan has it right: there comes a time when pre-release debugging is counterproductive.
Back in the early eighties, I was real eager to get a hold of WRITE, "Writer's Really Incredible Text Editor," a CPM word-processing program that had been designed for Byte's own Jerry Pournelle. It was loved by all of the few who had the pre-release, it was going to come out as soon as it was absolutely ready ... it got superseeded. I struggled along with the clunky, occasionally buggy word processors that were actually on the market. Compared to the perfect, bugfree word processor that would do everything while taking up essentially no memory, they sucked. Compared to typewriters, they were heaven.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. I'll take good enough today over perfect Real Soon Now.
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