China makes space program breakthrough, bye bye Elon!

Don Y snipped-for-privacy@foo.invalid wrote: |------------------------------------------| |" /Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien/"| |------------------------------------------|

Not a good idiom. (S.

For engineers, I think it quite apropos. One of my first bosses used to express it as "It's time to shoot the engineer" (else we'll NEVER have a product)

Don Y snipped-for-privacy@foo.invalid wrote: |----------------------------------------------------------------| |"On 7/15/2026 9:45 AM, Cóilín Nioclásín Glostéir wrote: | |> Don Y snipped-for-privacy@foo.invalid wrote: | |> |------------------------------------------| | |> |" /Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien/"| | |> |------------------------------------------| | |> | |> Not a good idiom. | |For engineers, I think it quite apropos. One of my first bosses| |used to express it as "It's time to shoot the engineer" (else | |we'll NEVER have a product)" | |----------------------------------------------------------------|

I do not deem this French saying to be appropriate. I had not realized that I had misinterpreted many of your old posts, as I had not interpreted that your 1st boss encourages you to still program in machine code (as assembly languages and FORTRAN are better so for wimps) on punched cards made out of sea weed for a computer with valves without solid-state electronics, and moreover to code weakly typed input interfaces. (S.

My first boss only had the possibility of using machine code as HLLs didn't exist for the i4004. We actually used "pocket assemblers" to generate much of the code as the notion of a "development system" didn't yet exist.

He was correct, however, in instilling the notion that striving for "best" (perfection) is foolhardy in a commercial, market-driven setting. Your competitor will "settle" for "good" and capture ALL of the market while you're still trying to get that "last 1%".

You seem to be suffering from delusions. How strongly typed you *code* an interface is a separate issue from the languages that you use to reify it.

Don Y snipped-for-privacy@foo.invalid wrote: |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |"[. . .] How strongly typed you *code* | |an interface is a separate issue from the languages that you use to| |reify it." | |-------------------------------------------------------------------|

We code strongly typed interfaces in a strongly typed language. (S.

In practice it usually meant that that the boss was too stupid to understand what the engineer was saying, and wanted the product shipped with the fatal error that the engineer was trying to get rid of.

All the engineers I've known have been able to understand "good enough for government work".