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<blockquote data-quote="azhrei_fje" data-source="post: 4911212" data-attributes="member: 12966">I apologize for my choice of words.&nbsp; A bad mistake on my part.I am impressed that you continue to develop the product with just two programmers on staff!&nbsp; Those must be some true hotshots to cover such a large code base!I haven't worked in a proprietary software environment for ... about 20 years.&nbsp; (Hmm, actually closer to 18.)&nbsp; And even then it was in an industry in which the sale of an application suite was expected to include source code, although the license was still quite restrictive.&nbsp; (Those who were around in the heyday of mainframes may remember that such machines always came with source code to the operating system.)When I referred to &quot;fear of change&quot; I was talking about the overall environment.&nbsp; For example, suppose you have two programmers on staff that both know C++ very well but know little or nothing about Eiffel.&nbsp; Even if Eiffel provides the absolute &quot;best&quot; environment for writing a new application there will be that fear of something new, that fear that perhaps the programmers won't pick it up quickly enough or that the compilers will have bugs or that deployment will be difficult or...&nbsp; These fears are often a large factor in driving management to make a business decision against switching to another language.&nbsp; (This is obviously a blanket statement and won't apply in every situation or to every company, which is why I used the term &quot;often&quot;.&nbsp; For an analysis of this 100% human reaction, Google for &quot;software risk analysis&quot; and &quot;risk avoidance&quot;.&nbsp; This is a documented artifact of the software development industry.)An interesting corollary is that such a business will always be playing catch up with others in their market:&nbsp; they can never be at the front of the pack because they cannot truly innovate.&nbsp; Oh, they can develop new features or extend existing features, but they are always held back by the existing code base and having to work within that framework.&nbsp; Innovation requires change, quite often a very radical change.&nbsp; (Ask your programmers how much of the code base they'd like to rewrite if they had the chance.&nbsp; It will likely be about 30% of the code and the largest portion of that will be library functions that are used frequently.&nbsp; See Martin Fowler's book, UML Distilled for his empirical evidence.)Sorry, I've started rambling.&nbsp; I'll stop now. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Again, I'm sorry.&nbsp; My tone above was inappropriate and I don't have any excuse for it.&nbsp; I was a bit exasperated at the entire Windows software development industry and took it out on LWD. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown&nbsp; &nbsp; :("&nbsp; data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />The next time you're in Tampa, drop me a note and the first (and second!) beer will be on me. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="azhrei_fje, post: 4911212, member: 12966"] I apologize for my choice of words. A bad mistake on my part. I am impressed that you continue to develop the product with just two programmers on staff! Those must be some true hotshots to cover such a large code base! I haven't worked in a proprietary software environment for ... about 20 years. (Hmm, actually closer to 18.) And even then it was in an industry in which the sale of an application suite was [i]expected[/i] to include source code, although the license was still quite restrictive. (Those who were around in the heyday of mainframes may remember that such machines always came with source code to the operating system.) When I referred to "fear of change" I was talking about the overall environment. For example, suppose you have two programmers on staff that both know C++ very well but know little or nothing about Eiffel. Even if Eiffel provides the absolute "best" environment for writing a new application there will be that fear of something new, that fear that perhaps the programmers won't pick it up quickly enough or that the compilers will have bugs or that deployment will be difficult or... These fears are often a large factor in driving management to make a business decision against switching to another language. (This is obviously a blanket statement and won't apply in every situation or to every company, which is why I used the term "often". For an analysis of this 100% human reaction, Google for "software risk analysis" and "risk avoidance". This is a documented artifact of the software development industry.) An interesting corollary is that such a business will always be playing catch up with others in their market: they can never be at the front of the pack because they cannot truly innovate. Oh, they can develop new features or extend existing features, but they are always held back by the existing code base and having to work within that framework. Innovation requires change, quite often a very radical change. (Ask your programmers how much of the code base they'd like to rewrite if they had the chance. It will likely be about 30% of the code and the largest portion of that will be library functions that are used frequently. See Martin Fowler's book, [i]UML Distilled[/i] for his empirical evidence.) Sorry, I've started rambling. I'll stop now. ;) Again, I'm sorry. My tone above was inappropriate and I don't have any excuse for it. I was a bit exasperated at the entire Windows software development industry and took it out on LWD. :( The next time you're in Tampa, drop me a note and the first (and second!) beer will be on me. :) [/QUOTE]

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