文章借助食物的类比，说明不同质量与制作方式的选择带来不同体验，并由此谈到软件中的取舍与权衡。
Greg Knauss has my attention with a food analogy in his article “Lose Myself”:
A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème chantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming chunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cream directly into your mouth [...] The level of care, of personalization, of intimacy — both given and taken — changes its nature.
I love food and analogies, so let’s continue down that path. Take these three items for example:
- A McDonald’s cherry pie
- A Marie Calendar’s cherry pie
- A homemade Jim Nielsen cherry pie
Which one of these is the best?
I’m sure an immediate reaction comes to mind.
But wait, what do we mean by “best”?
Best in terms of convenience? Best in terms of flavor? Best in terms of healthiness? Best in terms of how ingredients were sourced and processed? Best in terms of price? Best in terms of…
It’s all trade-offs.
I don’t think we talk about trade-offs enough, but they’re there. Always there. We might not know what they are yet if we’re on the frontier, but we’re always trading one thing for another.
“McDonald’s cherry pie is the best cherry pie ever.”
That’s a hot take for social media. We wouldn’t accept that as a rational statement applicable to everyone everywhere all the time. People have preferences, products have strengths and weaknesses, that’s the name of the game.
“All software in a year will be written by robots.”
Also a hot take, not a serious statement. It’s impossible to apply such a generic prediction to everything everywhere all of the time. But also: “software” hand-written by humans is not the same as “software” generated by a machine. To presume the two are equivalent is a mistake. There are trade-offs.
Everything has trade-offs, a set of attributes optimized and balanced towards a particular outcome.
You get X, but you lose Y.
Life is full of trade-offs. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.