How Intuit Manages 10 Million Lines of Code 304
CowboyRobot writes "Intuit launched QuickBooks in 1992, and it has grown into the best-selling retail software for small-business accounting worldwide. QuickBooks is available on multiple platforms with different feature sets (Pro, Premier, Enterprise), in specialized editions (accounting, contracting, etc.), is available on CD or via subscription, and is offered in localized versions for the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. How they manage so many builds is a case-study for large scale programming. 'The Windows version is about 80,000 source files, 10+ million lines of C++ code plus a little C# for the .NET parts. Plus help files, tax tables, files defining local accounting rules, tax and other government reporting forms, upgrade offers — a lot of files. Every customer gets the full version. Specific feature sets are turned on and off with the license key.' And the lessons are not just technical. 'One surprising lesson is that small teams work, even for very large codebases — especially, Burt says, in sustaining an entrepreneurial, creative culture.'"
-2000 Lines Of Code (Score:5, Insightful)
n early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.
Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.
He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.
He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.
I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt [folklore.org]
point is, just cause you can manage it, doesnt mean 10,000,000 lines of code is really something to brag about, especially for something that feels as cheap as quickbooks (though it does a ok job if your accountant cant use excel and must have things that visually represent checks)
Re:-2000 Lines Of Code (Score:5, Insightful)
point is, just cause you can manage it, doesnt mean 10,000,000 lines of code is really something to brag about, especially for something that feels as cheap as quickbooks (though it does a ok job if your accountant cant use excel and must have things that visually represent checks)
If your accountant is using Excel to run your books that means it's time to get a new accountant.
Re:-2000 Lines Of Code (Score:5, Insightful)
excel is a tool not a solution
quickbooks is more of a solution, but like the the 150 piece toolkit for 19.95 at harbor freight, it may do the job just fine, it may snap under the load
Re: (Score:3)
Excel is a perfectly good spreadsheet program. I don't know what you think they're using it for, exactly, but for storing grids of numbers and applying simple calculations to them repeatedly, it can't be beat. I know it's the 'cool' thing to hate on Microsoft, but they actually have some good accomplishments if you look beyond their modern ventures and current vomiting-up of Windows.
The sad thing is Excel can probably do every last thing QuickBooks can, likely in about 5% of the code.
Re: (Score:2)
I joke that in my last job I fixed two bugs on my first day without writing a single line of code. One bug required me to add a line, one required me to remove a line. Net LOC of 0. And a completely useless measure for my day.
Re:-2000 Lines Of Code (Score:5, Insightful)
doesnt mean 10,000,000 lines of code is really something to brag about
No, but managing 10 million lines of code successfully is something to brag about.
However it got there, it's there now, and trying to figure out what to do with it, in a way that gets customers their product, teams their appropriate access, doesn't break every time a new intern looks at it, and can track changes back to individual employees so you can evaluate them somehow.
I'm not saying this isn't a problem other people haven't solved - certainly they have, but different solutions may offer some pieces of unique insights.
Re: (Score:3)
point is, just cause you can manage it, doesnt mean 10,000,000 lines of code is really something to brag about, especially for something that feels as cheap as quickbooks (though it does a ok job if your accountant cant use excel and must have things that visually represent checks)
I don't think this is your typical criticism for bloat. Just managing an annual mountain of tax laws and applying them correctly would easily go over thousands of lines. Fine lets use Excel to do that, what is the limit for tabs in a workbook? I bet VB will be a tiny bit slower calculating your tax refund and lets hope it doesn't blow the stack.
Re: (Score:2)
Since they have US, Canadian and UK versions of the software I doubt the tax rules are hardcoded.
Define 'hard coded'. It would be really difficult to implement that logic through settings, and I seriously doubt they're using any sort of scripting or plugin system.
Re:-2000 Lines Of Code (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
If the form asks how many lines he wrote, why is he including lines he deleted?
Do you "write" deleted lines? No.. then stop being a smart ass and put what you wrote on the form.
You must be a real joy at parties.
He was trying to make a point. And a good one at that.
And I dare say Bill Atkinson can program circles around most anyone you could name. His 68k assembler code in the Macintosh Toolbox was the very model of efficiency.
So yes. Yes you DO put deleted lines in that form, as they were "altered" in the process of development, you pedantic dullard.
I thought I disabled ads. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I thought I disabled ads. (Score:4, Interesting)
As a QuickBooks user, who prefers it to MYOB at least, I ask this question in all honesty:
What else is out there for small businesses that's better than QuickBooks and isn't a cloud-based service?
Re: (Score:2)
a quick google - shows
http://www.gnucash.org/ [gnucash.org]
and it seems to be quite active
Re:I thought I disabled ads. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I thought I disabled ads. (Score:4, Informative)
I disagree. As long as your books are kept correctly, the accountant only needs three things:
1) Profit and Loss 2) Balance Sheet 3) Depreciation Schedule
Gnucash does all of those. Print them out. Hand it to your account. And you're done.
As a small business owner using GnuCash, it's not quite that simple. Accountants like using tools like QuickBooks that they are very familiar with, and they don't want to have to re-enter all the data. So printing out the information is useless for them. You really need to export it to a format that both support.
Sadly, GnuCash does not support exporting Quicken/QuickBooks formats. It will important them with some extra file filters, but no export capability. My solution is to export to CVS which QuickBooks can import as well. Haven't tried it yet, but my accountant & I will be working through it when the time comes.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I thought I disabled ads. (Score:5, Informative)
Sage Peachtree is the main competitor in the self hosted small business accounting realm. To be honest if my dad wasn't so opposed to a hosted solution I would have had him go that way as even with 5 users the cost difference once you add up the server and licenses wasn't that great over five years.
As far as QB goes, it seems to finally be ok. Up until 2007 it still couldn't run as a limited rights user and required short printer names both of which caused me serious pain as I was the IT department for a midsized accounting firm and getting QB running in Citrix was NOT fun. We had premier enterprise support and their answer to the LRU issue was to grant Everyone full rights to HK_Classes_Root (NOT a good idea). I eventually figured out what keys the user needed access to and published the solution online to help others but their spaghetti code was so bad even then that nobody could actually tell what it was doing to give me the right answer.
Re:I thought I disabled ads. (Score:5, Insightful)
Piles of code is never a good thing
FTFY.
for anyone that may need an explanation - does anyone? - either the code is necessary (and, thus, won't be thrown into a pile, but carefully and continuously polished and made as small as possible) or it's not - in this case, it's truly a liability.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, noooo, no, what about all the HR screams that this is not a sound business???
Re: (Score:3)
If it takes 20 million lines of code (Score:5, Insightful)
If it takes 20 million lines of code to do ones taxes there is simply something very wrong with the process.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. The problem is most people are too stupid to demand a simple solution.
Re: (Score:3)
So then why has nobody come up with a better product, then, Mr. Billionaire?
Re: (Score:2)
I have often thought about this very question in regards to quickbooks. The best assumption I can come up with is it is difficult to get anyone interested in writing such a application.
It is tax software for god sakes, I cannot really seeing that many developers jumping up and saying hey that fucking rocks I want to write some tax software.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:If it takes 20 million lines of code (Score:5, Insightful)
disclaimer: I work in the financial software field in a business very similar to Intuit.
Every time this comes up Slashdot is inundated with lots of comments about how easy this should be. It's not. Get over it.
The problem with financial software is that because of regulatory constraints and tax laws it's nearly impossible to start from scratch. Tax laws are vast. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly vast they are. I mean, you may think it's complicated to write an operating system, but that's just peanuts to tax law.
The secondary problems for payroll compliance and tax law is that they change (with alarming frequency). You probably don't know this because you're a single case, but on the federal and state level hundreds of changes happen each quarter for something like payroll taxes. Almost none of them apply to you. But every one of them applies to someone, and it's something you've got to get right. Oh yes, and let's not forget the thousands of cities, counties, and school districts that all have their own compliance.
In software development, you're left with a few choices in this matter. Pare down the problem, scale up the development, or adopt a progressive model and hope you don't go bankrupt waiting to ship while keeping up with the changes along the way.
If you pare down the problem you've limited your market share. Deciding that you'll only handle, say, Federal filings means that your customers are left on their own for state compliance. It's a niche, sure, but a really small one. That's how every one of the companies you've heard of doing tax filing or payroll software started. And then you work really hard to make your company more and more relevant and scaling up quickly.
For option two, development can't scale this large from scratch. Brooks's Law (in this case) means the entire thing will collapse into a black hole of non-shipping code long before you've made it out of Year 1. And it's got to be nearly perfect -- people will tolerate a certain number of bugs in their games, but getting penalties from the IRS will keep your customers from coming back.
So you want to tackle federal and state taxes (no local) with your launch product? Expect to take at least a couple of years for this, and line up the appropriate capital to keep you in business meanwhile. Plan on using the last 25% of your development and test cycle bringing the code up to compliance with the regulations that have shifted while you were mucking around building the product. (i.e. if you can write and test it in 18 months, expect to ship in 2 years because you'll need the last 6 months just to catch up). That number is from experience, folks. Just try to find a venture capitalist that'll fund this kind of effort into a market that already has a few large players (Microsoft Dynamics, Intuit, Solomon) and dozens of small ones for a product that's just marginally better. Just try.
"I'm a web developer! I deal with shifting standards all the time!" No, not like this. There are thousands of standards and they move as often as quarterly and they're all published separately by different entities that don't interact at all. Screwing up browser standards in a web application usually means something doesn't display right and you find out right away; doing the same in payroll taxes means large penalties vastly disproportionate to the size of your mistake which you don't hear about until the letter arrives months later.
"I'll build clever databases!" "Properly designed rule sets will be my silver bullet!". Nope, think again. You're working against an adversarial opponent: politicians. Politicians need to raise taxes without looking like their raising taxes. Their rule sets can have unlimited complexity in their efforts to tax you while not looking like they're taxing you. They do just make shit up. If Congress wants to have an employer payroll tax for companies over 20 employees that have more than
Re:If it takes 20 million lines of code (Score:5, Insightful)
- Everybody and their mother (at least in accounting-related clerical work) knows Quickbooks. Whatever you come up with would have to be similar enough to justify the training expense.
- Intuit really does spend a lot of effort keeping track of various local, state, and federal regulations, at least in the US, and applying them to their software. That's not cheap or easy.
- Since Quickbooks is something of an "industry standard", it's possible to share Quickbooks files among necessary individuals (outsourced accountants and the like) and know that the books are getting from point A to point B. Not everyone has a copy of, say, Peachtree lying around, to say nothing about GnuCash or anything else.
- Accounting is generally not something that businesses start "experimenting" with. Predictable and supported are what they're looking for. Given a choice between a technically superior product from a company that just received angel capital last week and a predictably wrong product supported by a company that's been selling and supporting accounting software for 30 years, most businesses will go the safe route and buy the technically weaker package. It's actually pretty rational if you think about it; switching accounting packages is not trivial by any stretch of the imagination, so picking the product from the company with proven staying power makes a lot of sense.
Personally, I think Quickbooks is kind of the Microsoft Access of the accounting world - oh yes, there are better, far more stable tools out there, but too many people know Access and its quirks for all but one or two of them to catch on in any meaningful sense. That's inertia for you.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:If it takes 20 million lines of code (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be willing to bet a few billion dollars that a competent group of people could implement QB in under a quarter of the lines of code while both improving the quality and making it significantly faster in every regard.
So then why has nobody come up with a better product, then, Mr. Billionaire?
He said 'willing', not 'able'.
Re:If it takes 20 million lines of code (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be willing to bet... that a competent group of people could implement QB in under a quarter of the lines of code
Agreed. But then the business aspect comes into play: can they market it well enough to displace the market leader? There's plenty of crap out there that makes money despite the fact that better options exist. If it was as easy as just competent programming, someone would have done it already.
Re:If it takes 20 million lines of code (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
The statement is still correct. If it's not a problem with the computer program, there is something wrong with with the tax code portion of the process if it requires 20 million lines of computer code to calculate. How can you ever be sure you have done them correctly? Even without using a computer.
Perhaps especially without.. 20 million computer-lines worth of tax code doesn't seem like something that a person would even be able to calculate without a computer.
Maybe computers are the worst thing to happ
there's no good competitor (Score:5, Insightful)
My last job involved many, many frustrating hours with QuickBooks - every week. It's a steaming pile of crap. There were so many basic things missing, like decent reporting, that it was a total joke. I could go on for many long rants about how much I hate the software. We wanted to integrate Fishbowl, so we could do some trick inventory manipulation, but it wasn't implemented before I quit. They are still working on it.
In my new job, I get the daily reports from our 5 stores. QB failures are mentioned daily. I am so happy to be in an entirely different department.
I really wish there was competition for QB. I think it's a fine platform if you are a very small business with a limited product line. Get complicated, and it fails.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Dynamics is fine as long as you don't involve the POS CRM module (at least that was the case six years ago when I last had to deal with that evil, evil pile of junk).
Re: (Score:2)
So rather than wishing for a competitor for QB, which would be designed for the same market and thus almost certainly have the same flaws... get off your butt and search out the proper program designed for your business/sector. QB is a good tool, but if you're pushing past it's boundaries, that's not QB's fault.
Linux - Not Even Close (Score:2)
I tried hard to beat WINE into running it, but alas no luck - at least the version I run.
I looked at what's out there in Linux accounting software, and either it was really obscure, apparently abandoned, or aimed at mega-corps, not small and home businesses. Plus none of it offered an easy way to handle Canadian tax frameworks.
And of course we wanted an accounting package that our accountant wou
You can survive (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I thought Money was a better product.
Re: (Score:2)
There are lots of folks who thought their Microsoft product was better for a while. But when it doesn't suit Microsoft's strategic goals to maintain it it's dropped like a hot rock. When that day comes it doesn't matter how much you liked it, nor how much you had invested. They have no care for the preservation of your data either - they made it incompatible on purpose, and you should have known better is their view.
Whether or not you can be made to know better before putting your data into their produc
Re: (Score:2)
Quicken and Quickbooks is the only application I know of to have survived a full-on Microsoft assault on their business. Microsoft Money has folded. It's something to be proud of, I guess - for now.
Detailed here: Inside Intuit: How the Makers of Quicken Beat Microsoft and Revolutionized an Entire Industry [amazon.com]
Maybe the small business standard...but (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
it's just accounting software is really hard to develop, so it doesn't have many strong competitors.
Not only that but accountants (aka bean counters) are notorious for being cheap as hell. Almost none of them would be willing to pay the likely unit price of a really good small business accounting system. Indeed, I wonder what the piracy rate on QuickBooks is? I'll bet that it's probably pretty high.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
By not fixing code that sucks? (Score:2)
Hope they handle their code better than customers (Score:4, Informative)
The last time that I tried to contact Intuit about Quicken on Linux was a mess:
http://dotancohen.com/eng/quicken_on_linux.html [dotancohen.com]
I certainly hope that they handle their code better than they handle their customers.
No offense, but that doesn't sound like a lot (Score:3)
Link here in case you want to play the game I wrote [shockwave.com]
Just out of idle curiosity: I wonder how many lines some of the bigger projects out there have. For example, how many lines of code do some of the Linux OS Kernels have? I'm curious because is 10 million lines actually a really large code base, because it doesn't sound it.
Re: (Score:3)
Just as a curiosity, why do you have a single file of more than 30K lines? Isn't that way over the top?
Re:No offense, but that doesn't sound like a lot (Score:5, Funny)
Just as a curiosity, why do you have a single file of more than 30K lines? Isn't that way over the top?
Not if the entire program is one enormous switch statement in the main() function.
Re:No offense, but that doesn't sound like a lot (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, right, you wrote, debugged and tested 500 lines per hour for 800 hours... We believe you. Now take your pills, your straitjacket, go back to your room and let the adults talk.
Re: (Score:2)
#include
int main(int argc, char** args) {
char *msg= "T"
"h"
"i"
"s"
" "
"i"
"s"
" "
"a"
"n"
"n"
"o"
"y"
"i"
"n"
"g"
printf("%s\n",msg);
return 0;
}
Theres 29 lines right there, and it didnt take a lot of time to code or debug
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
you're guessing at the number of lines? too lazy to run sloccount [dwheeler.com]? It's in the packages repository on a lot of distros.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
my one file had 120k lines to it. So at low estimates, I guess I wrote, debugged, and tested 100 lines per hour for 800 hours. Is that a good rate? I know my manager says I code more efficiently in 14 hours a week than the four of his old coders did in 40 hours. I don't have much experience working with others to compare myself, no one ever wants to hire me.
That's not why no one wants to hire you. The reason no one wants to hire you is because you write 120k line files. You suck at programming, no one wants to read that crap. Industry standard tends to be around 1,000 lines per file in C code, and 500 lines per file in Java. I am 99% certain your poor habits show up in your interviews. Learn to write readable code.
I will tell you though, I would LOVE to give you a job interview, because I you would surely do something entertaining that I would tell stories a
Re: (Score:3)
Managing your own code vs managing 10m of code someone else wrote are very different. Even the most stupidly trivial functionality can take forever to figure out in someone else's code.
There's also code densitity... I once single handedly `wrote' 250k lines of code in an evening... by writing a generator against Rational Rose files... Draw a box with a name and some attributes, and bam... you got a dozen files of about 10k total lines (ddl, store procs, database helpers, value objects, corba stubs/skeletons
Re: (Score:2)
The code I write is in such a hyper agile methodology that I use shorter variable names for disposable variables just in order that I don't have to type a long name out. If I would just slow things down a bit, I could make my code more readable to other people, but I never planned on anyone else besides myself using
Sounds like a lot (Score:2)
Particularly considering it's just a "simple" tax programme.
It sounds like, instead of implementing the logic in data (i.e. arrays, external text files, etc) and having a fairly small compiler targeted at the problem, they implemented everything in C. This is something even C advocates advise against.
Support is the other question... (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe Intuit does feed their programmers well. Now if they would just hire some decent support people. We used to use a multi-currency version of QuickBooks, and the errors were simply astounding in their stupidity. As one, minor example: it was completely clear that some conversions were handled using floating point numbers, with the inevitable decimal rounding errors. At the end of the year, we had huge currency conversion errors - far beyond what even floating-point errors could explain - and essentially impossible to justify to the tax authorities.
There were lots of other problems as well. Trying to report errors was like talking to a black hole. The one time we really needed some real-time support, we spent ages on hold, or going around in circles with different people, and wound up getting no useful help at all. In the end, the only solution was to go back to a single-currency system, and deal with currency outside of QuickBooks.
Still, as bad as our experiences with QuickBooks have been, there's nothing better in the same price category.
The Finite Monkey Theorem States: (Score:3)
A monkey hitting keys at random on a keyboard for a finite amount of time will almost surely code a 10 Million LOC program, such as the complete works of Intuit.
* adaptation of the Infinite monkey theorem
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Funny)
Given that they haven't managed to come out with a native version of Quicken for Mac in over 6 years, I suspect that they kept that code on a napkin... then lost the napkin.
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly, there area lot of better choices for real accounting software, QuickBooks is money for dummies. And my wife cringes when the new company she goes in to fix has quickbooks, She knows that it will be all screwed up. Quickbooks will let you fudge the books easily, and most "entrepreneurs" not only know nothing about book keeping and accounting, they are too cheap to hire one right off the bat to make sure everything is kosher. So my wife gets big $$$ to come in and fix their books and accountin
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
No kidding! If it takes 10 million lines for QuickBooks, then it is probably stored in a .txt file using the decimal number ASCII representation of the letters in the code instead of the letter itself.
I have seen programs that do a hell of a lot more than that does (3D graphics, advanced audio processing, database software) written in fractions of that amount of code. Two million lines should pretty well top out any overcomplicated calculator program, unless it's written for the government. It sounds like t
Re: (Score:3)
No kidding! If it takes 10 million lines for QuickBooks, then it is probably stored in a .txt file using the decimal number ASCII representation of the letters in the code instead of the letter itself.
...
So in summary, their case study should be titled "How NOT to manage program code"
The article is actually very interesting. It is not trying to justify the size of the code base, it is discussing the mechanisms they use to make a code base of that size manageable. I've never tried to manage anything bigger than 750KLOC, but even at that size build times and broken builds were a constant problem. So talking about the techniques that let people productively work on a code base 13x that size is interesting.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bah. (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the alternative? And don't give me some unix freeware crap, I've tried several, they are crap. Microsoft Money was the only viable alternative, but the conversion process sucked ass. I have 18 years of quicken data that I'm not about to lose, and until there's a real alternative for consumers (i.e., $100 price point), I'm not leaving, regardless of the weird interface, and periodic interface bugs. At least the database is rock solid. (runs to knock on some wood)
Re:Bah. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
So this Quicken Essentials [intuit.com] for Mac isn't the Quicken you wanted?
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Funny)
People who own Macs don't understand technical geeky things like numbers and are way too cool for accounting.
Considering we overpay for everything and buy new iShinies every 3-6 months, I'd say keeping track of our finances is even more important for us than for you bottom feeding 99%ers and your 'PCs'.
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Funny)
Meds not working like they used to any longer? I know how you feel, try the little blue ones.
Re: (Score:2)
Given that they haven't managed to come out with a native version of Quicken for Mac in over 6 years, I suspect that they kept that code on a napkin... then lost the napkin.
They kept it on a floppy drive. They weren't sure how to access it when they got their new iMacs. They got someone to copy it to a CD, but that was at the same time their MacBook Airs showed up.
Re: (Score:3)
Given that they haven't managed to come out with a native version of Quicken for Mac in over 6 years, I suspect that they kept that code on a napkin... then lost the napkin.
Pretty disgusting for (yet) a(nother) company who owes its success to the Apple ][.
For those of you too young to remember, Quicken started out as an Apple ][ ONLY checkbook program written in (of all things) Pascal.
Re: (Score:3)
Not really, given Jobs did all he could to undermine & destroy the Apple IIgs (Woz's creation) because it was outselling the unprofitable Macintosh (Jobs' baby), and decided that no more Apple II family systems would be released.
You mean the IIgs that came out in September 1986, a year after Jobs left Apple? Man, you guys really don't even know the basic facts about Apple.
Re: (Score:2)
I briefly worked for Intuit. IIRC, their policy is to focus on Windows because they "... don't want to spread their resources to thin."
Yeah right. Like they can't afford to hire some Objective-C programmers.
As I said before, pretty disgusting for a company who owes its very EXISTENCE to Apple.
Re:Bah. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah right. Like they can't afford to hire some Objective-C programmers. As I said before, pretty disgusting for a company who owes its very EXISTENCE to Apple.
It's absurd to say that they owe their very existence to Apple. Does everyone who develops software for Windows "owe their very existence" to Microsoft?
If they thought they could make a profit by porting their software to OSX, they probably would have done it. But large companies generally don't act for purely sentimental reasons.
Re: (Score:3)
Does everyone who develops software for Windows "owe their very existence" to Microsoft?
Pretty much yes, MS can cut off their market whenever they want.
Apple makes software for Windows. Does that mean Apple owes its existence to Microsoft?
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Funny)
Does that mean Apple owes its existence to Microsoft?
I just felt a great disturbance in the Apple fandom, as if millions of fanboys suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Well they did finally re-compile Mac Quicken 2007 for x86 (only $15! to upgrade) so I guess they found the napkin. After a year of searching for it.
It's not an upgrade for $15, it is a stand-alone product that's Mac OS X Lion compatible, no previous version required. You can get the direct download for only $15 [intuit.com]. I opted for this instead of dumping $50 on Quicken Essentials which from all accounts is inferior in every way. After I upgraded to Mountain Lion this weekend, it was the first app I launched, and I was promptly greeted with an update notification to improve Quicken 2007 performance for Mountain Lion.
Re: (Score:3)
Supposedly they didn't even do that; they licensed a version of Rosetta from Apple sufficient to run their old version.
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Funny)
Real programmers kept their code on punch cards.
Or toggle patterns written on a napkin.
FTFY
My college took out the card punching stations the semester before I took Fortran, though they still had the vacuum drum reader and used it occasionally. And, of course, the CRT terminals were inputting card format - first six characters for line number, 78 characters per line max.
The fossilized prof told stories of entering assembly op codes, in octal, with rotary dial interfaces.
Now, get off my... um, I forget, but get off it, NOW!
Re: (Score:2)
How Intuit Manages 10 Million Lines of Code? Very carefully. Next question!
You meant "Not very well".
Re: (Score:2)
Real programmers keep their code on punch cards.
No, real programmers do it by hand. [sacbusiness.org]
Re: (Score:2)
that is in the cayman islands ver of the software.
Re:Was Intuit important in the past or something? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Was Intuit important in the past or something? (Score:4, Funny)
And, even they had some signficance sometime or somewhere, why should I care about how they manage lines of ancient code?
Because they roll up the money they make on re-selling the same code base year after year, insert the money in their nostrils, then finally, they separate out single lines of code and snort them.
That's why.
Re: (Score:2)
$3.9 billion in revenue last year [intuit.com]