Cheating with distribution

One should not make tradeoffs with the major benefits expected from distribution. This would force to reevaluate the basic reasons why distribution is wanted in the first place.

As an example, one could consider to sacrifice scalability. Doing so, one should however go back reconsidering the reason why strategies like "buy a bigger machine" have been (implicitly?) side-stepped priorily.

Citation from Robert Martin, himself refering to Scientific American:

However, the software crisis is more than just this. The real crux of the software crisis is that it appears that the probability of failure increases geometrically, perhaps asymptotically, with complexity. This is scary. It implies that there is an upper limit to the complexity that we can control with software. That beyond this complexity limit, no project can succeed.

This relationship was nicely documented in one of the 1995 issues of Scientific American.

Table of contents


Marc Girod
Last modified: Sat Feb 28 14:26:41 EET 1998