I once worked on a project in which a software product originally written for UNIX was being redesigned and implemented on Windows NT. Most of the pr… - Ellen Ullman

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I once worked on a project in which a software product originally written for UNIX was being redesigned and implemented on Windows NT. Most of the programming team consisted of programmers who had great facility with Windows and Microsoft Visual C++. In no time at all, it seemed, they had generated many screens full of windows and toolbars and dialogues, all with connections to networks and data sources, thousands and thousands of lines of code. But when the inevitable difficulties of debugging came, they seemed at sea. In the face of the usual weird and and unexplainable outcomes, they stood agog. It was left to the UNIX-trained programmers to fix things. The UNIX team members were accustomed to not knowing. Their view of programming as language-as-text gave them the patience to look slowly through the code. In the end, the overall 'productivity' of the system, the fact that it came into being at all, was not the handiwork of tools that sought to make programming seem easy, but the work of engineers who had no fear of 'hard.