Shipping the prototype: “Years ago,
Shipping the prototype: “Years ago, when the paint was barely dry on Visual Basic 3.0, a developer showed me a CD-ROM-burning application he’d written using that toolkit. The idea was to prototype the UI in Visual Basic, then rewrite in C for performance. But in the end, he admitted somewhat sheepishly, “we shipped the prototype.” I saw nothing to be ashamed of. It was — and is — a brilliant strategy. My only regret is that it hasn’t been adopted more widely.”
Interesting article, but I wish he wouldn’t intermingle the idea of “prototype” with “scripting language”. Tim O’Reilly nicely argued years ago for moving to scripting languages (in short, faster processors are cheaper than more programmers).
That doesn’t mean we should ship unfinished, tested, or undebugged code/products, which is what the word prototype implies. I’m with Cooper on that one: throw ‘em away!
Comment by victor — 2/7/2003 @ 10:36 am