Arguing (or Coding) for Your Limitations
Over the past two days I've been forced back into a project that I have been out of for a very long time. There's a need to get something done quickly, fixing a long lost (and wished forgotten) developer's code, and so I get pressed into this. Whatever... it's not what I wanted to do, and I stated that I was probably not the right guy for the task, but was forced into it anyway.
When I originally started this project - Oh so many years ago, my partner and I decided to make it cross-platform: Windows and Linux, IE and Firefox, because you never knew, and maybe someday we'd move to Firefox. So we made it that way. Things progressed, he left, another guy came, I gave the project to him, and I moved on.
Now I'm back, and I'm very surprised at what I'm seeing. Gone is the cross-platform capabilities - it's IE only now, Baby! It's not that hard to make it cross-platform, it just takes a little bit of effort. Why they didn't put this in, I can only guess - like most people, they all are looking for the easy way out. Since they don't have any users running Firefox now, they don't need to worry about it, so don't even spend a second thinking about it.
Problem is, it only takes a few minutes to get things so they work on both platforms. It's not that hard. I had to change a little Javascript to get the applet tags written out properly. I added a little compressed string code to the applet writer to make it faster to download and pretty much bing! it's done. Not that much to it. But you'd have thought it was weeks of work that just weren't worth it.
It's always worth it. Forget that someday you might actually need it, there's value in making something a little more generic than you need. Just in case you want to see if it's the platform or your stuff. Isolate the problem or variable. Easy. But I guess they are so wrapped up in IE they don't even care to look outside that box. I understand the logic, I'm just disappointed.
It's like the line out of Illusions by Richard Bach - Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours. It's as if they wanted to make the system less capable. They aren't bad people, just not really making any effort to see beyond their immediate horizons. It's a waste.
I'll finish this page and then bow out and hopefully not have to deal with it for another several years. It's just not fun to come back to a system you had pleasant memories of to see it's all decayed and in need of repair. Sad.