(2002-02-21) h

Paul Graham on the joys of server-based software . At ViaWeb (Yahoo Store), I doubt we ever had ten known bugs at any one time... Today a lot of the top hackers are using languages far removed from C and C++: Perl, Python, and even Lisp... At Viaweb we often did three to five Release-s a day... Being able to release software immediately is a big motivator... What big companies do instead of implementing features is plan them... The test drive was the way we got nearly all our new users... at the end of it they had built a real, working store... Who will the customers be? At Viaweb they were initially individuals and smaller companies, and I think this will be the rule with web-based applications... I once worked for a medium-sized desktop software company that had over 100 people working in engineering as a whole. Only 13 of these were in product development. All the rest were working on releases, ports, and so on... If there is a downside here, it is that all the programmers have to be to some degree system administrators as well. When you're hosting software, someone has to be watching the servers, and in practice the only people who can do this properly are the ones who wrote the software. At Viaweb our system had so many components and changed so frequently that there was no definite border between software and infrastructure... When Viaweb was bought by Yahoo, I suddenly found myself working for a big company, and it was like trying to run through waist-deep water. I don't mean to disparage Yahoo. They had some good hackers, and the top management were real butt-kickers. For a big company, they were exceptional. But they were still only about a tenth as productive as a small startup.