No time to write in the blog or continue on the Theory of Constraints series today.
I’ve been updating the documentation for the Wiki2Go wiki that is used to host, amongst others, this site. It’s quite easy and fast to set up if you know what you’re doing. And I do. But others are now setting up Wiki2Go sites and are asking how to do it.
As Fred Brooks says “A programming product costs roughly 3x as much as a program.” As others start using and developing Wiki2Go I have to invest in (user and developer) documentation, installation tools, administration user interfaces, deployment…
Brooks describes another type of product, a “Programming System Product” like the operating system he worked on before writing the book. This one costs 9x as much as the program itself.
This should serve as a warning to framework writers: how much more costly is your framework than writing the code? 3x? 9x? Are you sure you will recuperate that investment? Will programmers write their applications 3x faster? 9x?
If you’re interested in developing Wiki2Go, the project is now hosted on Rubyforge
And read this book!
