Jeff Attwood whom I otherwise respect a great deal, wrote something silly today. I think he suffered a glamour attack from Winer whom I don't respect at all.

Quoting Winer:

An old software slogan at Living Videotext: "We Make Shitty Software... With Bugs!" It makes me laugh! We never ran this slogan in an ad. People wouldn't understand. But it's the truth. We make shitty software. And so do you!

Software is a process, it's never finished, it's always evolving. That's its nature. We know our software sucks. But it's shipping! Next time we'll do better, but even then it will be shitty. The only software that's perfect is one you're dreaming about. Real software crashes, loses data, is hard to learn and hard to use. But it's a process. We'll make it less shitty. Just watch!

Quoting Attwood:

You heard it here first: all my software is shitty.

There are a handful of programmers in the world capable of producing brilliant, perfect code. All the rest of us can do is keep making our software less shitty over time-- a process of continuous improvement. Given my current status as the best programmer in the world, it's difficult to eke out any improvement, but I do make a noble effort.

I really despise this approach. This idea that we are all horrible sinners and god (users) shall have pitty on our soul leads nowhere. If anything else it creates new software developers with severe psychotic disorders.

We do what we do, because we must. We do so under constraints which always effect the quality of what we create. There is no shame in shipping something which is imperfect in some way.

Software should be shipped when it passes a certain quality bar. The height of that bar is defined in your head alone, or in the contract you have signed with your client.

This whole approach of squeezing so many quality dimensions into good and bad is silly anyway.