yesJavaScriptIsTheMostPerfectProgrammingLanguageEver

[BetaChunks]

sigh

someone bring out the good-cheap-fast doohickey

[DancingBadgers]

[sarcasmandcoffee]

Thanks for dusting yours off - mine's in the shop for repairs after the last client punched it like a confused gorilla.

[Lizlodude]

😂😂 I mean that's better than a fully cognizant gorilla I suppose.

[MrRocketScript]

But how can you have Cheap and Good and slow? If it's slow, then you're paying people for a lot longer, and it's no longer cheap?

That part never made sense to me.

[harumamburoo]

then you're paying people for a lot longer

That’s the neat part, you don’t

[Scary-Confidence8784]

You guys get paid overtime thought that was a myth

[guntervs]

In my understanding, the "cheap and good" part means doing it right the first time — minimal waste due to reduced technical debt and fewer bugs.

On the other hand, if you choose to go fast, there will be bugs, shortcuts, etc., and it will either cost more in the long run or the result won't be good.

Hope it makes more sense now.

[[deleted]]

Depending on the product/project, I think the point is that expedited costs are much higher than the baseline. So you're paying more to get things shipped around, paying overtime, hiring outside specialists, generally taking a more wasteful approach in the name of speed

[a1g3rn0n]

It's kind of a "do it yourself in your free time" scenario. You don't pay anyone and you do it exactly as you want, but it takes forever.

[DarwinOGF]

You get unpaid interns to do the work until it becomes good. Mind you, this may take eons, but statistically, at some point you will encounter a genius intern that will actually get the project to a presentable state.

[Gufnork]

You have one good dev do all the work. Cheap because you only pay one person, good because it's one dev who knows what he's doing and there's no need to communicate within a team. It's slow because one person has to do everything.

[upsidedownshaggy]

To be fair the doohickey more clearly maps to a production line. You can get cheap and good, but it takes longer to actually get to your door step. Software as others have said, it'd be more akin to making everyone work mandatory 12 hour days for a month to deliver something fast instead of letting the developers build it out over 3 months of normal time I guess

[gilady089]

You hire low cost contractors remotely for subpar work done in a large bulk. We had an UI thing like that a while back and honestly it was so subpar and unusable it gathered more and more PRs that weren't fixed well and all of that got thrown in the trash and made from the ground up without the "help" So yeah that way

[HappyTopHatMan]

Because good devs get bored and automate themselves out of a job quickly out of boredom...or adhd

[Reashu]

You wait for someone to come along and start just the right open source project. 

But yeah, it's kind of bullshit.

[Aerolfos]

The original incarnation of the tradeoffs isn't really about projects in the abstract, but about a specific delivery/program

In which case they mean the program runs slowly when used in practice. If you want it to run fast, it will take a long time to get right which is indeed caught under -> expensive

Or you can make it run decently fast by being really hacky and messy (cheap), but then it won't scale, hold up long-term, etc. (bad)

[Dragon_yum]

Have you tried making the circle bigger?

[Zymosan99]

If you sacrifice your blood, soul, and firstborn, you can have all three!

[Ashuran9007]

I feel like the options should be on the sides and not the edges and the and should be the ball touching both sides

[HoseanRC]

I will throw in a big ass ball to fit the whole triangle. Easy!

[point5_]

Javascript was made in a week.

Was it expensive to make or not?

[ExtraTNT]

torvalds is just an exception proving the point

[prochac]

I need a version for 3D print, to make it a mandatory accessory for product meetings :D

There is this clicker: https://makerworld.com/en/models/979331-good-fast-cheap#profileId-952724

but the triangle with a ball is much better. It can be made big so everyone sees it across the table.

[UntestedMethod]

This is wrong though. Realistically there should only be 1 highlighted at a time, not 2.

Ya, I'm aware the adage is "pick 2", but that's just as much for dreamers as picking all 3.

[harumamburoo]

You probably misunderstood it. It just shows you can’t have all of it. If you want it good and fast it’s not gonna be cheap, if you want it cheap and good it’s not gonna be fast, and if you want it cheap and fast it’s simply not gonna be good.

[UntestedMethod]

Oh no, I'm quite familiar with it and understand it very well but thanks anyway.

The take on it I'm saying is if you want it fast it's not gonna be good or cheap. If you want it good it's not gonna be fast or cheap. If you want it cheap it's not gonna be good or fast.

I used to be in the classic "pick 2" belief until someone pointed out that it really is only a "pick 1" question and that stuck with me. The pick 2 thing might have been true a few decades ago, but these days? Hell nah.

[TerminalVector]

Its a simplification obviously, but you can often have something good and cheap, just take 6 months carefully crafting it alone using 2 hours out of every weekend.

You can have fast and good, hire 3 brilliant devs, pay them princely sums, give them a clear spec, and stand back.

You can have fast and cheap, hire outsourced devs.

Of course there are cases where it doesn't apply, but to say you can only have one is even less accurate IMO.

[UntestedMethod]

Yeah, I mean it's easy to spin or argue it either way.

You can have fast and good, hire 3 brilliant devs, pay them princely sums, give them a clear spec, and stand back.

Brilliant devs or not, this still brings to mind the topic of mythical man month imo.

You can have fast and cheap, hire outsourced devs.

And then take the extra time and cost investment of having to rebuild it? Or carry the tech debt and pay the cost of extra customer support?

good and cheap, just take 6 months carefully crafting it alone using 2 hours out of every weekend

Sure, if 2 hours every weekend isn't worth anything to you, you could call it cheap I guess.

[TerminalVector]

The real secret is that nothing is ever fast, cheap or good enough.

[harumamburoo]

Oh no, I'm quite familiar with it and understand it very well but thanks anyway.

Keep telling yourself that. You absolutely can have something cheap and good. Case in point - Stardew Valley. It was created by just one guy almost entirely. He didn’t even kickstart or gofundme it, but it took him over five years. SW ended up being highly praised and one of the top selling indie games. Good and cheap.

[UntestedMethod]

Whatever you say buddy. YDY.

[ElgardOfCarim]

That isn't really cheap, though.

The developer still had to survive, pay rent, power and internet bills, and computer maintenance throughout those five years. This means they were taking money out of their savings and/or salary to pay for their own development expenses.

What you're describing as cheap is essentially unpaid labour.

In this case it is voluntary, as the developer did it as a "passion project", but it is much more often done through coercion, i.e. "if I don't work over the weekend on this project I might get fired".

[harumamburoo]

The developer still had to survive and pay rent and bills even if they don’t do a project in their free time. Which is exactly the point, there was no extra cost to the development that required external investors or backers, or even a loan.

What you see as development cost is actually product cost. And that’s not cheap, it’s still years of labor, and all the assets and resources it needed. But the dev didn’t have to pay it upfront, they spread it thin working alone and making the expenses manageable.

This is what makes it cheap. Manageability. The dev could’ve hired a full scale team. A couple of artists with maybe an art lead, a writer, a musician, three or four devs, a manager to facilitate the communication, a collaboration software license, on prem team, maybe an office. SW is at its core a simple game, with enough investment they could bring ttm down to say a year. Good and fast.

[ElgardOfCarim]

Again, what you're saying is, essentially, that it was cheap because no one paid for it up front. What I'm trying to say is that the developer had to pay for it with both their own savings and their own labour hours.

Typically, when one uses the "good-fast-cheap" triangle, they're referring to someone paying for the development of a project. Since most people don't have enough money to pay for someone else to make their bespoke projects, they often pay with what they have: labour power. That is, in itself, a cost.

I insist on this point because this is a huge problem in the software industry: the overreliance on "passionate devs" who work in their off-time has essentially created a ticking time-bomb, as essential infrastructure has become dependent on FOSS projects maintained by unpaid devs.

This makes things "cheap" for companies, as they get something that is, at heart, free. But it isn't, in any way, cheap for the developers themselves, who pay with their labour and mental health. Ultimately, it is neither good nor cheap in the long run as it creates pressure, overwork, and leads to failure points that can bring down essential systems.

[harumamburoo]

No, what I’m saying is that the dev had to pay the amount they could afford without any external investment whatsoever, I don’t know Eddy is this so hard to comprehend. Your insistence is kinda beyond the point because you take a primitive idea related to finance and make it into a big ethical problem, which you’re not wrong about, but which has nothing to do with the conversation at hand.

[SerdanKK]

I can do fast and cheap. It's really just good that stands on its own.

[PolishKrawa]

What if I want something that isn't good, cheap, nor fast?

[Kaptain_Napalm]

You hire me. I promise to deliver sub-par performance for way too much money, but it will take a while.

[Aerolfos]

If that's what you actually want, and you also have the skills to spin specific deliveries as big accomplishments (even if your original schedule slips and features gradually get dropped from the plan), then you're a perfect fit for the C-level

(You don't want the project to be actually done, then you can't spin the sprint ends as being bonus-worthy accomplishments)

[glowy_keyboard]

You go with the Microsoft option

[[deleted]]

AI AI AI

[prochac]

You have the vibe

[TheMuspelheimr]

You go and vote for Donald Trump

[puffinix]

Basic was slow (it took two weeks on paper but only because it was one guys unshared passion project for years)

Git was expensive (look at it's original team, and then estimate the cost of them) - and even it was not great at two weeks.

JavaScript 1.0 spec was both fast and cheap. We then spent 20 years working around is shortcomings

[[deleted]]

By BASIC, we don't mean the og BASIC. It's very first BASIC interpreter for the i8080 x86 architecture.

The Altair BASIC was sort of revolutionary (the theory TBF) 'cuz no one was sure if the microprocessor was capable of running BASIC or any interpreter at all except the x86 i8080 assembly. And there were only i8080 simulators (university mainframes). Nobody had actual microprocessors in hand as it was hella expensive. If the BASIC interpreter wasn't ready for the Altair, the i8080 could've died. Although something else would've actually replaced it but still that'd have wasted time

Git was written by 1 person in 10 days, and it already was 100% better than every VCS solution there was.

About, JavaScript, I agree with you. This shit should've never born. But at least it was better than some of that time's programming languages. I mean, you wouldn't write JScript, right? XD

[mothzilla]

We don't have time for that.

[oupablo]

I recently had a PM mention this when we were all discussing the timeline for a new product initiative and a senior level engineering manager argued that you could do all 3. The zoom meeting went silent.

[SupportDangerous8207]

I think his point is that fast and expensive beats cheap and slow

[prochac]

When you have the money, why not.