Comment by shimman
1 day ago
Agreed. Still amazed that people keep trusting the service that has like a 60% failure rate, who would want to buy something that fails over half the time?
Shame OP stopped their book, it would definitely have found an audience easily. I know many programmers that love these styles of books.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) it does not have like 60% failure rate. Yes, there’s some non-negligible error rate. But it’s lower than the threshold that would make the average user throw it into the bin. We can pretend that’s not the case, but it doesn’t even pass the real life sniff test.
You don't know when it's wrong.
This reminds me of the VHS vs Betamax debate.
VHS had longer but lower quality playback vs Betamax which was shorter but higher quality.
It wasn't clear when VCRs came out which version consumers would prefer. Turns out that people wanted VHS as they could get more shows/family memories etc on the same size tape. In other words, VHS "won".
Most people have heard the above version but Betamax was widely adopter in TV news. The reason being that news preferred shorter, higher quality video for news segments as they rarely lasted more than 5-10 minutes.
My point being, the market is BIG and is really made up of many "mini-markets". I can see folks who are doing work on projects with big downside risk (e.g. finance, rockets etc) wanting to have code that is tested, reviewed etc. People needing one off code probably don't care if the failure rate is high especially if failure cases are obvious and the downside risk is low.
The version I heard was that Sony wouldn't allow porn on Betamax, but VHS was less prudish. Hence VHS won the format war. Don't know how true this is.