Engineering, in general

Today I put up a tent. This wasn't some high-tech mountain climbing special, but an ordinary one from one of the major retail chains, the same brand as the ones we used when I was growing up. It was reasonably light and compact for what it was, certainly lighter and more compact than the comparable model a generation ago.

It wasn't too hard to put together, even a year after last having done the exercise and without looking at the instructions. There were two colors of poles, black and gray. The black poles slipped through black openings and attached to the tent with black clips. The gray poles slipped through gray openings and attached with gray clips.

At any point, there were only a few sensible things to do. Most of them worked, and if you got something wrong -- tried to seat a pole at the wrong spot, for example -- it would soon be clear that it wasn't going to work. If you got the three main poles bent into place, you had something resembling a tent in shape. Everything after that made it a better tent -- roomier, more stable, easier to get into and out of, shaded, what-have-you.

If you neglected to do something small -- clip a particular clip or fasten a particular little strap -- the result was only slightly less good than if you hadn't. If you left out something major -- left the fly off or decided not to stake it down -- there would be a more noticeable effect. The result might be sub-optimal, but you could tell something was missing and choose to fix it if you wanted.

This particular tent was old enough (and cheap enough) that the elastic cord holding two of the poles together had broken. That made it harder to keep the sections of the poles together at first, but once the poles were under load there was no functional difference. The design still worked even with a less-than-perfect implementation.

In other words, it was a very nice piece of engineering. You could tell that the company had been making tents for quite a long time. The lessons to be drawn, say regarding user interface and design for robustness, are so obvious I won't bother to point them out.

Or as I used to say, if the average software shop ran as well as the average sandwich shop, the world would be a better place.