Ok, so there is a New Year’s Day marathon of “Holmes on Homes” on HGTV today and it has got me thinking a bit. Basically, this contractor, who clearly knows what he is talking about, goes around to botched building and renovation projects and points out what was done wrong by the original contractor through laziness, maliciousness or just plain stupidity. He then proceeds to fix everything. Holmes abhors not doing it right the first time and often shows how patch work falls apart even sooner because of the poor base it is built on.
As this show relates to what goes on in a lot of software, I have two thoughts. One, maybe cutting corners, being stupid and being lazy are unfortunately natural human tendencies. This depresses me. Two, it is a lot easier to rip a piece of rotten wood out of a structure to demonstrate and convince people of the poor quality of the work, then it is to convince people how crappy some chunk of software is. This also depresses me.