Comment by adamnemecek
6 years ago
This sort of time accounting makes no sense.
A lot of these feats were the first _successful_ version, however the people behind them had careers of doing the same thing over and over again.
It's not like Brendan Eich went from not knowing how to write a language to shipping a language in 10 days however this article presents it like this.
It's not like Boeing went from nothing to 747 in whatever amount of time. Building an airplane get much easier when you already have a factory for building airplanes.
Like I can work on something for a decade and day before shipping, give it a new name and say "hey, I shipped it in a day".
It might take a chef an hour to make a meal. But he might have been optimizing that hour his whole life.
The tale of the Chinese emperor and the picture of the rooster
Once upon a time, there was an emperor who was extremely fond of roosters, and so one day he commissioned the most famous painter in all his realm to paint him a picture of a rooster. The painter replied that it would take him three years to accomplish this. The emperor was secretly rather annoyed, but in the end he agreed.
When the three years came to an end, the emperor summoned the painter, but on seeing that he was empty-handed impatiently demanded: "What about my painting of a rooster?" The painter remained perfectly calm, took up a piece of paper right where he stood, and started to paint. The brush flew across the page, the ink danced. With apparent ease, he produced the lifelike image of a rooster, capturing its very essence. It took him less than three minutes to complete. On seeing this, the emperor was furious and could stand it no longer: "Have you been deliberately deceiving your king? Is this some act of rebellion? It took you just three minutes to paint that picture; why did you make me wait three whole years?" To which the painter replied: "Sire, first please calm your fury; and when you have done so, follow me and see for yourself."
The painter led the emperor to a large house and opened the door, and on looking inside, the emperor realised that the house was filled to the roof with sketches of roosters. Then the painter spoke: "These are my efforts of the last three whole years. Without those three years of labour how could I possibly have produced that perfect rooster for you in less than three minutes?"
Not sure why this is getting down votes. This needs to be kept in the back of the mind that overnight success is a fallacy. Not sure why pc chose not to put the idea that each of those fast achievements had years of works behind them.
Why not add "Usain bolt took only 9.86 seconds to run a 100 m"
Is he claiming that the people involved weren't experts? It doesn't seem that way to me.
I think it's just the opposite – he's demonstrating how much rapid progress can be made when you cut the red tape and get the right people working at full capacity.
He then contrasts this with the municipal government of San Francisco, which operates under a different set of principles. Namely: maximize red tape, use unqualified people, and exert minimal effort, all while lighting money on fire because you have an enormous annual budget and no accountability.
I agree that's the point, but for all we know there could be years of education, planning, failed trials, preparation, and/or red tape omitted from these timelines.
No doubt they put in a lot of work.
But also, it's very unlikely that any of them would have taken 20 years and $310 million dollars to create a bus lane.
Yes, and the same with Unix too, it's fascinating how people cut their teeth on something for years and the end product is simply genius.
thank you!
was having the same thought as i was going through the examples. and when the unix example came up, it dawn on me that the author is clearly omitting the background of these people to make a more compelling point.
yes they did great feats but most have a history of doing similar and learning from it in the past. fast-forward to present days, and our issues with not going fast enough, maybe the conditions and situations are different? maybe we are in a learning phase?
also for a better account of what happened in unix case, i recommend kernighan's latest: unix: a history and a memoir.
Regardless, there are lots of stones to be thrown at our inability to build infrastructure and do projects that are not novel in any way on-time and on-budget.