Industrial Strength

Software that continues to correctly solve a problem, no matter what chaos surrounds it, is industrial strength. It just works, it always works.

It is about reliability and expectations. The code is there when you need it and it behaves in exactly the way you knew it would.

You can be certain if you build on top of it, that it won’t let you down. There will always be problems, but the industrial-strength stuff is rarely one of them.

If code isn’t industrial strength it is a toy. It may do something cute, it may be clever. The results could be fascinating and highly entertaining. But it is still a toy.

You don’t want to build something serious on top of toys. They break when least expected, and they’ll do strange things periodically. They inject instability into whatever you are doing and whatever you have built on top.

Only toys can be built on other toys; they’ll never be industrial strength. Something fragile that breaks often can’t be counterbalanced properly. Contained perhaps, but the toy nature remains.

Lots of people market toys as if they were industrial strength. They are not, and highly unlikely to ever be. Toys don’t “mature” into industrial strength, they just get more flaky as time goes on.

Industrial strength is a quality that has to be baked into every facet of the design right from day one. It is not accidental. You don’t discover it or blunder into it. You take the state-of-the-art deep knowledge, careful requirements, and desired properties, then you make difficult tradeoffs to balance out the competing concerns. Industrial strength is always intentional and only ever by people who really understand what it means.

There is nothing wrong with toy software, it can be instructive, fun, or entertaining. But for the things that we really depend on, we absolutely do not want toy software involved. Some problems in life are serious and need to be treated seriously.