2014-06-03 17:17:07.114892+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Two thoughts that are longer than a tweet but not an essay:
Last night I was talking with Charlene about how companies incur technical debt, and then don't pay off that debt (but continue to pay interest), and how, unless a technology is your company's core competence, spreading development over multiple customers is more economically savvy than developing for a single customer: For instance, developing an accounting system in-house vs paying six figures a year for maintenance on an external one. Then this morning I see @jwgoerlich tweet:
Four in the morning thoughts. Technical debt is another form of business debt. It is an investment providing you manage the payments.
Something in the zeitgeist, I guess.
And then this morning, a long twitter exchange about Apple's new language, "Swift", and C++ and modern languages made me realize that:
- We don't have a good cross-platform language other than C++.
- I was going to leap to the defence of C++, and then saw the GnuTLS bug of the day.
- Containerization, with tools like Docker, is quickly chasing language development as the path to building isolated systems (even more so than SELinux), and that sort of process isolation also works for situations where we don't trust the code to not go snooping no matter what the language (for instance, Skype, especially given the revelations about NSA cooperation within both that tool and Microsoft's environment).
No complete thoughts there, but I kinda feel like there's a common thread between those two symptoms.