…But the question is, do you want it get done or do you want it get right!
A quote from the talk on channel 9 with Erik Meijer, Bertrand Meyer and Yuri Gurevich. Charles Torre (the interviewer) is asking, why the majority of the programmers using languages like C++, PHP, C#, Java etc and not “better” ones)
Charles: “…theres also this notion of productivity. I’m a developer, there’s an algorithm I’ve to write, I want it get done in 8 hours and not 36 hours.”
Erik: “But the question is, do you want it get done or do you want it get right. … That’s probably the problem that we confuse productivity with you know getting it done quickly. ….”
That in my opinion really a problem in wide areas of the software development areas. We complete forget how many hours we’re debugging, fixing etc. That’s why I just can’t stand language with Pointers (because pointer are unnecessary difficult to get right), I really still unlucky with languages like Java or C# (they still make it to easy to shoot yourself in the foot). That why I further really like tools like Tools for static analysis. I hope that for example in the .NET world Spec# merges with C# and becomes a standard in the language and that in the Java-World they introduce specification-annotations which can by checked by the compile/tools.
Btw. Erik Meijer gives always interesting talks. There are more interviews, talks of him on channel 9 and elsewhere.