Ran across this quote the other day: “The ultimate limit to software is courage. Imagination is a distant second.” Gerald Weinberg said it, and like many other people, it got me thinking.
So often we think that imagination is the limit – that whatever we can imagine, we can create. And it is true – we can create anything (generally speaking, with the appropriate time and money). But I find however, that Jerry is right on with the limit. The limit is always courage. It comes in many forms, and is always far more limiting than imagination. It’s the courage to do something new when the old has not failed, or the courage to cut out a feature and do something simple and less complex, or perhaps to abandon the fringe customers in favor of appeasing the core audience. The courage to abandon what worked well enough and try something that might work much much better.
We all have the ideas, that isn’t the problem. We just don’t have the courage to try them.
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