[om-list] Good Software Takes Time

[Mark Butler]

Hello everybody,

I found a good article about the time it takes to develop good software:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/stories/storyReader$368

The basic point is that world class software takes about ten years to develop
before it is good enough to dominate a market.  This seems about right to me,
especially for anything started from scratch.

By the way, I am still developing my family tree reduction program.  I am
developing a class framework in C++ that uses smart reference and reference
list types to automate page-in from a database by reference.

Transaction support is now available for MySQL and I am thinking about using
it as the backend for a large genealogical object store.  For performance
reasons, I won't be storing the data in a standard normalized relational data
model, but rather will just be storing the equivalent of XML/GEDCOM/LISP
fragments in a couple of tables and building necessary secondary indexes by
hand.

The general idea is to read all the information about a person in one I/O
operation rather than six or seven. This causes lots of extra work min the
indexing (similar to full text indexing on the web), but is worth it if you
are in a performance critical read dominated environment.

- Mark